It’s April 2000. I’m 14 years old, lying on a beach in the Bahamas, a bottle of SPF 20 at my side. I periodically check to see how my suntan is developing, watching with fascination as my pale white skin turns a deep, chestnut brown. Through the headphones of my Discman, Baz Luhrmann is telling the class of ’99 to “trust me on the sunscreen.” I nod along to the beat, oblivious to the irony. Luhrmann’s caution is ahead of the curve.

Looking back, 14 seems very young to have been chasing a tan: a remnant of 1970s and ’80s childhoods where we didn’t blink twice at Sun Lovin’ Malibu Barbie featuring “peek-a-boo tan lines”—pale bikini strap-marks painted onto her bronzed body—and Suntan Tuesday Taylor, a plastic doll that developed a “tan” when she got enough natural light.

Nowadays, children and adults alike know the dangers of suntanning and the importance of taking preventive actions, like staying in the shade when the sun is strongest, covering up with clothing and hats, and reapplying a high-factor sunscreen to exposed skin regularly. But when did we start using sunscreen, and why? What does this history tell us about how we use it today, and how we might work toward a more sun-safe future?

In my home country of Britain, sun products in their earliest forms were intended to treat a sunburn after it had occurred. Handwritten recipes of such remedies date back to at least the 18th century. Many of these balms included household ingredients such as milk, lemon juice, and eggs, along with items from the kitchen garden, like strawberries, sage, and cucumber. Lemon juice’s citric acid would reduce pigmentation, although with quite a sting and the risk of serious irritation. Sage (steeped in water as a wash for the face) and cucumber would be soothing and cooling. Strawberry extract has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties and vitamin C content; recipes instructed people to crush the fruit directly onto their face before bedtime to give their skin “the most beautiful tint” in the morning. Among the historical ingredients, bullock’s gall (cow bile) stands out as particularly unappetizing; why it was used we can’t be sure, but research has shown that it may have unexpected medical benefits.

By the early 1900s, British seaside vacationers were able to pick up a bottle of “sunburn lotion” from the pharmacy. Formulas varied, but typically they included zinc as the key ingredient, which dermatology books also recommended. Zinc would continue to appear in sunburn remedies—today in the form of calamine lotion for sunburn relief.

Remedying the effects of sun exposure was all very well and good, but even better was preventing sunburn in the first place. Before we got to full sunblock (which zinc oxide would also come to feature in), for much of the 20^th-century suntan creams had a different primary goal: averting an “unsightly” sunburn while encouraging a “glamorous” suntan.

The “cult of sunbathing” began in the late 1920s and took off in the 1930s, aided in Britain by the growth of continental European tourism. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D. H. Lawrence describes the “acres of sun-pinked” bodies sunbathing on the Venice Lido as not just burnt but “sun-cooked.” An array of suntan creams, lotions, and oils rapidly entered the market around this time, billing themselves on the promise of “suntan without sunburn.” A tan, wisdom went, was not only aesthetically appealing but also safe and healthy.

Early 20th-century scientists thought that the increased pigmentation of the suntan would protect the skin against what was believed to be the more damaging sunburn. So, if you gradually built up a suntan, you were supposedly increasing your skin’s natural “protection.” This misguided idea perpetuated for decades—exemplified in the United States by the famous “tan don’t burn” slogan that long accompanied the Coppertone girl. We now know that there is no such thing as a safe tan: the increased pigmentation of a suntan offers minimal protection, and moreover shows that the damage has already occurred. Instead, those early “suntan without sunburn” creams would have been allowing then-unknown long-term damage to take place. We also now know that while the early focus was on increasing pigmentation to protect pale, white skin from sunburn, sun protection is important for all skin tones.

But to get where we are today, some big changes had to happen. Already in the early decades of the 20th century, ingredients like quinine and aesculin (a chestnut extract) were showing some sun-screening efficacy. Then, in the 1930s, rapid advances in this technology began to proliferate. In 1935, chemist Eugène Schueller, who later founded L’Oreal, added benzyl salicylate to a tanning oil, marking the way for chemical UV radiation absorbers.

The first modern commercial sunscreen—chemist Franz Greiter’s Glacier Cream—arrived on the market in 1946. Greiter later developed and popularized the sun protection factor (SPF) rating, and his early cream is estimated to be around SPF 2. At around the same time, during World War II, pharmacist and airman Benjamin Green discovered “red vet pet,” a petroleum jelly substance that served as an effective sunblock for soldiers. It would later be developed into a more consumer-friendly formula sold as the famous Coppertone suntan lotion.

Our understanding of the dangers of UV radiation has been advancing ever since. Now, the key focus of SPF development is on higher-efficacy formulas, and public health messaging has turned to the promotion of sun safety.

Despite what we now know about the health effects of UV exposure, the appeal of the glamorous tan persists. For those who want to safely achieve the look of Sun Lovin’ Malibu Barbie today, the 1930s tanning craze actually gave us one solution: “artificial bronzing” lotions. Marketed as offering “suntan without sunshine,” these fake tanning products were a welcome addition to the British market, especially, given our unpredictable summer weather. Early iterations were fairly simple formulas that used vegetable extracts to temporarily stain the skin, an effect that could be easily removed with soap and water. By the 1960s, more sophisticated fake-tanning chemical DHA was discovered: rather than staining, it interacts with the skin to create a more lasting effect. A boom of ’60s products followed suit, with catchy names like Easi-Tan, Turn Tan, My Tan, Man Tan, and She Tan. With today’s knowledge about the dangers of tanning from ultraviolet radiation, fake tan has an evident advantage as the only safe tan.

In 2019, my teenage beach days came flooding back to me as I sat in the doctor’s office, getting a mole checked out in a spot below my neck, where I’d had a deep, searing sunburn all those years ago.

It was reassuringly fine, but brought home the importance of continuing to keep an eye on skin changes while taking every precaution in the sun. Today if I’m on a beach it’s under a sun shade, with a T-shirt for extra cover, and the bottle of sunscreen by my side with an SPF 50 and a high UVA star rating.