Question About Tanning?

Your question about tanning – and how to get the best answer

Have a question about tanning? In that case I will personally answer any question you might have about how to tan correctly.

You can put your question about tanning to me either as a public comment to any post or in a private message from the contact page.

Here is one example of a question from a reader of thetanningguru.com and my answer below.

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Question about tanning From: C

Message: Hey, just wondering about something. If I am fairly light skinned andI burn easy, and get freckles, how can I maximize my chance to tan.Changing my diet has led to less freckles and more colour, but whatelse can I do to become more tan other than gradual exposure?

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Hi C, and thank you for your question about tanning!

I can read between the lines in your question that your goal with tanning is to get a darker skin-tone.

In that case, and taking into account how you describe your skin-type (you match almost exactly the description of a skin-type 1), the bad news for you are that you can not and should not try to get a tan.

The good news are however, that you need only very short time (<10 minutes) in sunlight (when the sun if high enough for its UVB rays to reach the earth) to get the full health effects (in the shape of Vitamin D) from sunlight.

There are two kinds of melanin (the protein that is produced in the skin as a natural protection towards UV-light). One is brownish and gets even more brown when exposed to UV-light.

The other kind of melanin is pink and does not change color in sunlight.

Nature has given your skin an abundance of the second kind of melanin and less amount of the first (only enough to give you freckles).

There is no known way (at least not to me, and I have studied this subject a lot!), to change this.

Don’t try to force a tan, it can create a lot of serious damage to your body. Be happy that you will quickly get a lot of Vitamin D only with a short stay in the sun.

Keep in shadow the rest of the time, cover with clothes and light (max SPF 15) sun-protection lotion (see my general advice about how to tan)

It will not help to take supplements. In order to change your skin-color with red vegetables and fruits (like carrots, also in concentrate), you have to eat so much that it will damage your liver.

You can try a lotion with cosmetic bronzer that will make your skin a little bit darker (like coloring hair), but it is hard to find any such lotion that doesn’t also contain DHA (delayed bronzer, Dihydroxyaceton) that oxidize the brownish type of melanin melanin to a darker color.

But since your melanin mainly is of the light-red kind, that doesn’t oxidize into a darker color, DHA is useless and will color your skin very unevenly.

I hope I have answered your question about tanning, even if it maybe was not the answer you had hoped on?