Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Department of History

Health and Beauty

Lecturer: Fabiola Creed

In this lecture, we will look at the relationship between health and beauty in Britain through a lens on tanning culture. We will explore different twentieth-century tanning technologies, and evaluate how they were first introduced as ‘revolutionary’ health enhancers, skin cancer preventors and safer alternatives? We will then explore why some tanning consumers were later stereotyped and stigmatised, depending on their gender, class, sexuality, race, and age. The history of tanning also shows the growing influence of mass media health advertising and campaigning by the end of the twentieth century.

Discussion/Essay Questions:

  1. Why were distinctive tanning technologies -- UV-lamps, sunbeds, ‘fake tan’ serums, pills, and injections – invented and mass produced at different times across the twentieth century?
  2. Who used tanning technologies, and why were certain demographic groups stereotyped and stigmatised, while others were not?
  3. Where and how were certain tanning technologies ‘consumed’, and why did this cause controversy?
  4. What was the changing role of the mass media in tanning-related advertising and later skin cancer campaigning?

Required Readings:

Tania Anne Woloshyn, 'Ch. 5: Photographic Suntans' in Soaking up the Rays: light therapy and visual culture in Britain, c. 1890-1940 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2017).

Fabiola Creed, ‘A History of ‘Safer’ Tanning Technologies through Dihydroxyacetone (DHA) Fake Tan and MelanoTan Injections’, in Rachel Elder and Thomas Schlich (eds), Technology and Health in the Age of Patient Consumerism (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

Fabiola Creed, ‘From 'Immoral' Users to 'Sunbed Addicts': The Media- Medical Pathologising of Working-Class Consumers and Young Women in Late Twentieth-Century England’, Social History of Medicine (2022).

Further Readings:


Tania Anne Woloshyn, ‘Chapter 1: Consuming Light’ in Soaking up the rays: Light therapy and visual culture in Britain, c. 1890–1940 (Manchester University Press, 2017).

Fabiola Creed, ‘Chapter 1: A Site for Self-Improvement: Jean Graham’s Beauty, Health and Sunbed Enterprise in Liverpool’ in The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear (McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming).

Fabiola Creed, ‘Chapter 2: The Boom of the Health, Fitness and Sunbed Industry’ in The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear (McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming).

Alex Mold, 'Consuming Habits: Histories of Drugs in Modern Societies’, Cultural and Social History, 4, (2007).

Virginia Berridge and Kelly Loughlin, ‘Introduction’ in Virginia Berridge, Kelly Loughlin (eds), Medicine, the market and mass media: producing health in the twentieth century (London: Routledge, 2012).

Alex Mold, ‘Introduction’ in Making the Patient-Consumer: Patient Organisations and Health Consumerism in Britain(Manchester University Press, 2015).

Virginia Berridge and Penny Starns, ‘Chapter 7: The ‘invisible industrialist’ and public health: The rise and fall of 'safer smoking' in the 1970s’ in Virginia Berridge, Kelly Loughlin (eds), Medicine, the market and mass media: producing health in the twentieth century (London: Routledge, 2012).

‘Chapter 3: Imagining Publics’ in Alex Mold, Peder Clark, Gareth Millward and Daisy Payling, Placing the Public in Public Health in Post-War Britain, 1948-2012 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Simon Carter, Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health (Berg, 2007).