This open access book explores tanning culture: how the desire for tanned white skin led to the phenomenal growth in sunbed use and how the practice spread through Britain. By analysing the role of the media, medical experts, and socio-political changes, The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed exposes how sunbed providers, consumers and the ‘sunbed tan’ itself shifted from ‘healthy’ to ‘harmful’ in late twentieth-century depictions. Fabiola Creed examines print media, film, medical journals, trade directories, catalogues, and children’s toys to map this transition.
The book begins in 1970s Liverpool when an affluent beauty businesswoman introduced sunbeds as a ‘revolutionary’ technology. In the early 1980s, the sunbed industry boomed with the mass advertising and fitness industry, epitomising Margaret Thatcher’s entrepreneurial spirit. Advertised as an everyday luxury for wealthy consumers, sunbeds became the acme of self-improvement.
Yet, by the 1990s, sunbeds were a mundane technology associated with working-class people and ‘excess’ consumerism. Following the rise in Western countries’ skin cancer rates, and subsequent ultraviolet research and health campaigns, the media stigmatised ‘sunbed addicts’; these young white women and metrosexual men were condemned for being an ‘immoral’ drain on the National Health Service. Yet, tanning culture and its ever-evolving technologies remain popular to this day.
Ultimately, The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed demonstrates how popular culture can reciprocally shape public health. It also sheds new light on key political, economic, medical and socio-cultural changes within everyday life in Britain. The book will appeal to those interested in the history of business, mass media, advertising, popular culture, public health, policy, and medicine, science and technology.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust.
By:
Fabiola Creed (University of Warwick UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350450332
ISBN 10: 1350450332
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 06 February 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction Part I 1. A Site for Self-Improvement: Jean Graham’s Beauty, Health and Sunbed Enterprise in Liverpool 2. Britain’s ‘Boom’ of the Health, Fitness and Sunbed Industry (1980-1982) 3. New Working-Class Consumers and the Bust of the Domestic Sunbed Industry (1983-1987) Part II 4. Medical Research and Stigma after the Sunbed Boom Years (1988-1990) 5. Spreading ‘Tanorexic’ Tanning Culture through Britain’s Print Press (1991-1994) 6. The ‘War’ against Skin Cancer, Britain’s Sunbed Empire and ‘Tanorexics’ (1995-7) Conclusion Bibliography Index
Fabiola Creed is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick, UK.
Reviews for The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain: Tanning Culture from Fad to Fear
Marshalling sources from the Yellow Pages to TV talk shows, Creed shows how and why tanned skin went from status symbol to sign of ‘chav’ culture – and what this meant for stigmatised users. An essential read for historians of historians of health, gender, and social class. * Tracey Loughran, Professor of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Essex, UK * This is an exciting book that sheds new light on consumerism, health, and body image in late twentieth century Britain. Creed’s exploration of tanning and sunbed culture makes deft use of a range of sources to provide invaluable insight into the importance of a popular practice. * Alex Mold, Professor of Public Health History, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK *
