Sun protection in the golden age

[Idledame]

As far as ordinary people and sunscreen go, my parents were in their teens and 20's in the 20's and 30s. They told me it was the fad to write things on your skin in iodine before going to the beach. Then when you got home the iodine would wash/wear off and leave the message in untanned skin. When I was growing up in the 50's there was still no such thing as sunblock. Everyone just burned and peeled over and over all summer. When I was a teenager in the 60's we used baby oil which was supposed to give a richer tan. Pale people would mix iodine in with the baby oil to make them look more tan though it must have kept me paler based on how my parents used it. I never thought of that then! Self tanners that turned you orange came out in the 60's. When they did come out with sunblock, it was greasy and you would sweat it right off. I was a letter carrier and I think I didn't start using sun block daily until maybe the 80's when they started to make some that wasn't greasy. Sun block and fear of cancer/aging is really relatively recent.

 

[Tomasso]

Coppertone dates to 1944, when pharmacist Benjamin Green invented a lotion to darken tans. The company became famous in 1953 when it introduced the Coppertone girl, an advertisement showing a young blonde girl in pig-tail in shock as a Cocker Spaniel sneaks up behind her and pulls down her blue swimsuit bottoms, exposing her pale white buttocks in stark contrast with her tanned body. Accompanying the ads was the impish slogan, "Don't be a paleface!"

 

[jayem]

jayem, I'm guessing that you're somewhere between Fullerton and North Avenue.

North Ave beach! Chicagoan?

 

[Lorena B]

Parasol and umbrellas!!

 

[John in Covina]

I seem to recall my mom talking about having your skinn rubbed with a fresh raw carrot which would help darken your tan.

Also while not protection lemon juice in the hair helped with summer time highlights.

 

[Edward]

I know the Victorians wore shaded lenses, though sometimes for different purposes than Sun protection: looking through blue lenses, for instance, was believed to ward off depression.

As far as ordinary people and sunscreen go, my parents were in their teens and 20's in the 20's and 30s. They told me it was the fad to write things on your skin in iodine before going to the beach. Then when you got home the iodine would wash/wear off and leave the message in untanned skin.

Lenora does this in Cry Baby - his initials, 'CB' (well... his nickname's initials, or that would have been WW for Wade Walker.... but hey...). She uses some sort of sticky tape, it looks like. I know John Waters put a lot of research into getting the historical details right, and they discovered that tanning / burning a boy's initials onto your thigh like that was a popular thing back in the early fifties (the film is set in 1954).

I seem to recall my mom talking about having your skinn rubbed with a fresh raw carrot which would help darken your tan.

Also while not protection lemon juice in the hair helped with summer time highlights.

I'm sure I read bak in the early nineties about Kurt Cobain lightening his hair by rubbing two pulped lemons through his hair and then sitting in the sun... I am also told that for ladies who don't wash their hair every day can spritz it up for those inbetween days by sprinkling in lemon juice....

 

[bil_maxx]

My grandmother used to say that they rubbed olive oil on at the beach to get a nice golden tan in the 1940s. Can you imagine that advice now?

I still think that a tan looks fantastic on a woman, by-the-way.