Exposure to the sun: the golden age

This entry is posted on number 21 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 20, 2025 and is part of the special beauty dedicated to how to sunbathe having only benefits

Those who grew up the sea, as happened to me, do not really know the meaning of the word tanning. During the year, although one always did the same things, especially in adolescence – the age in which you have the courage to admit that repetitions comfort as you proclaim that they want to make the revolution – the color of the skin changed. There was not even a specific name for the phenomenon, in the sense that the term tan was not used. Then the eighties arrived and they announced on the shelves of pharmacies and food with the tanning. Tanning oils, tanning creams, as if, in fact, the tan did not concern the sun, nor the season, but it looked more to a dress, a cosmetic, a dental prosthesis, or even a detergent. After the seasonal fruit, because vegetables and fruit came from a part of the world where it was summer while it was winter with us, the idea also ended that as the temperatures increased the skin tended to brown, darkening, sometimes, unfortunately, burning.

Therefore, oils and creams. I am not talking about refined, studied and conscientious products of now, but of an era in which women did not contribute to the cosmetic and health industry and therefore everything was more rigid, more usually, more boring as well (it is my idea, but on the other hand I sign these lines and I take responsibility for them).

At that time, the tan represented a status, it is not clear what. It was certainly in the months in which having golden or darker skin was not widespread. In August, to be clearer, that one was tanned was not strange, but that it was already in May or continued to be in November made questions arise. Not if you were Deborah Compagnoni between the late eighties and the beginning of the nineties, if you were a ski champion it was normal for the sun to have tattooed the mask of the glasses on your face. Or if you were Alberto Tomba. If you were a fisherman or bricklayer or farmer not even the question arose, you were biscuit when there was the sun and you were wet like a sponge when it rained. To make certain crafts you tanned even if the sky was always covered. It was the air that tanned. Which also has a certain sense from the point of view of physical laws, but I would not venture to write about it after so many years. In any case, the tan measured some well -being, that is, you had time to be lying in the sun or inside an tanning bed. And this happened for a number of years. Then, the sun fell ill, and began to be a danger, the status overturned, the well -being was measured by the lack of tan, that is, you had the financial availability of being able to protect yourself from rays, or with refined protective creams, real shields, or with large and wide umbrellas that presuppose bathing establishments with few very well -arranged human beings. This was why it was right, in Scauri, in my adolescence – that it will have been the adolescence of a generation, as always – we did well to observe the gradations of the color of the skin during the year as if they were the sunflower movements over a day. Things that happen. As for looking or fearing the sun, some unwritten rules were worth that it was possible to deduce from the age of those who were around in certain hours of light. Children in the stroller until nine in the morning, so the old ones. Between 11 and 15 the beach volleyball players, the ultras of the heat on the skin, and those with the not too low pressure. From 5 pm onwards the Gaudenti of the sunset. From 19 to 21 again old and children. I therefore fear that this partial reconnaissance almost exclusively autobiographical – but, I repeat, generational – must end with the frequent exclamation of my grandmother and that is: in all a measure. The tan is cultural and non -seasonal, and the excesses, deprive yourself of the sun or spend in the afternoon like a lizard, never do good. And probably even the eighties, where everything begins and ends, they will rightly never end.

Activate to the maximum

1. Sublima the complexion with the trio-moléculaire® formula that regenerates and oxygen the skin: Huile Visage and Corps SPF 6 Of Eisenberg (€ 69).

2. Solar trainer of Australian Gold: Hot! (€ 64.90), full of Aloe Vera intensification thanks to the highest quality oils.

Solar cosmetic with Activealoe. Formulation with a high tanning power, characterized by a concentration of over 70% of Aloe Vera.

3. Solar trainer of Australian Gold: 40th Anniversary Dark Tanning Accelerator (€ 28.90).

4. Without solar filter, Dark gelée Sol coconut + tanning activator Of Bottega Verde (€ 10.99).