Feel the burn: Ulrika Jonsson's tan has become a hot topic

Times

23-07-2025

It was when I saw on my daughter's Instagram feed a video that suggested changing the name of toasters to 'sunbeds for bread', in which young women admired golden slices of toast as an ideal facial aesthetic, that I knew something very strange had happened in the world of tanning. This isn't just a fad, it's a burning issue.
Ulrika Jonsson, the TV presenter, has posted on her Instagram account to address unkind comments about her recent appearance. Jonsson was seen on YouTube with a deep tan, around Yorkshire Tea on the Trump tan tint colour swatch. To achieve this with her fair Scandinavian genotype she has to put in the hours. Not only does Jonsson use sunbeds in winter, she wrote, but she likes the sun on her skin in summer. 'I'm not ashamed to say that I am a sun worshipper,' Jonsson wrote. 'And will no doubt pay the price for that.'
Jonsson, 57, was receiving flak for the ageing effect this has on her face. 'I understand that an over-tanned, imperfect and AGEING face offends you,' she wrote. But in terms of her joyful dedication to solar radiation, she was in fact ageing in reverse. Generation Z girls have ditched the safe fake tan of their mothers and joined an ancient and dangerous sun cult whose last-known practitioners died out in the 1980s, embalmed in Hawaiian Tropic.
Ulrika Jonsson
Sunbed use is on the rise, sunbathing is on the rise, melanomas are on the rise, the whole package holiday. If you need any convincing, ask a teenage or early twentysomething girl what the UV index is. I'll wait.
My life had been utterly untroubled by the UV index. In fact I hadn't even noticed when it appeared on the weather forecast in the early 2000s. It was put there to warn the public of the days when the sun's rays were at their most carcinogenic. Now the British UV index is as old as the only people who obsess on it: young women. But in a development that is in some respects quite funny, they have weaponised it for evil. For Gen Z girls, the UV index is an unholy tool in which good is bad and bad is good.
TikTok is now full of videos — some deadly serious, some satirical — about the need to intently track the UV index 'like it is the stock market and you are a day trader'. When the UV index reaches a ten, meaning there is a high risk of burning for white skin, the videos show girls cheering and running outdoors in their bikinis. Fake tan is deemed such an inferior substitute that girls apply it while wearing swimwear, carefully taping off the lines of their bikinis to make sure no one would guess they are doing anything the safe way.
What does it mean? In the 1960s young people innocently sacrificed their health to big tobacco because smoking was cool. Same as in the 1980s, when I tanned to burn, rotating on my beach towel like a doner kebab. Yet now we know the risks, doing it anyway becomes more interesting.
Sunburn is more carcinogenic the younger it hits. Skin cancer is now the third most common cancer among British women aged 15 to 44, according to Cancer Research UK. Melanoma is 2.6 times higher in women aged 20 to 24 than in men in the same age range. A long-term study on nurses published in Cancer Epidemiology in 2014 found that five bad sunburns between the age of 15 and 20 increased risk of melanoma by 80 per cent. Yet the UK's biggest tanning chain, the Tanning Shop, has increased its number of premises by almost 40 per cent since 2018.
• The best self-tanners for summer 2025 — and how to apply them
You don't need me to tell you all this. The evidence is clear and I'm not your mother. I am, however, a mother to a teenage girl. I am a regretful and reformed factor 50 zealot who creeps around in the shadows. Her friends, meanwhile, live in the light. I remind her that I am the wrinkled ghost — complete with a spooky white sunblock mask — of Christmas future. Her generation remind me of many things. Teenagers are designed to rebel: see the TikTok video of a teenage girl with a huge smile, captioned 'how it feels to tan when there's no rat in my ear telling me I'm going to get skin cancer' (to be clear, I'm the rat).
Smoking remained cool for young people in the 1980s even when we had full knowledge of the risks. All the warnings targeted at young people missed the point. It wasn't cool despite the risks, it was cool because of the risks. Telling teens that smoking was dangerous was its best advert. And in a similar vein to big tobacco, we now have big sun: smoking's wizened brown lungs have been swapped out for wizened brown skin.
Same for lectures from tan-phobic parents like me: they are all part of tanning's appeal. Tanning, like smoking before it, provides an addictive hit of youthful invincibility, like drugs or fast motorbikes. If you're neither going to die nor get old, why worry about wrinkles? Gen Z's tanning and ever-younger use of anti-ageing treatments such as Botox seems strangely contradictory. Yet in practice it is consistent. It's about looking good now. Those tanorexic elderly nudists with bits like beef jerky are of no relevance to them.
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A 2022 study in the journal Genes asked nearly 4,000 white British 25-year-olds about tanning. More than half said they 'liked to tan', with 90 per cent saying their favourite way was outdoors in the sun. Their top three reasons were in descending order 'it makes you happier', 'it gives you more confidence' and 'it makes you look better in photos'. Looking 'thinner with a tan' came in at number five. Only a fifth said they had not had a painful sunburn lasting a day or more in the last two years.
In the US mainstream politics is more into sunning itself. Donald Trump has so far remained silent on how he achieves his trademark skin tone. A White House official said in 2019 that it was the result of 'good genes'. But Unhinged, a memoir by the former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, claimed that Trump had a tanning bed in the White House.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, America's mahogany health secretary, believes in tanning. He was photographed leaving a Washington DC tanning salon last month. His plan to 'Make America Healthy Again', released in May, is unusual in not mentioning sunburn, one of the major lifestyle factors causing the rise in young people's cancer. Instead, in October Kennedy tweeted that the US Food and Drug Administration's 'aggressive suppression' of 'sunshine' would end under his reign.
I'm joking about big sun but, in a way, we do all live in the shadow of big sun — or rather, what feels like an ever hotter sun in our warming planet. 'I'm a solar panel,' one sunbathing young woman joked on social media.
This generation of young people are perhaps unique in their gloominess about the long-term future. If measures to cool the planet aren't being taken, why bother taking measures to stop your skin burning? We may all burn one way or another. The Kennedy rhetoric here is appealing: maybe, hopefully, the scientists have it wrong about the dangers of the sun in every way. Or if they don't, if we are all going to fry, why not go down with a beautiful tan that will look great in the photos?
'My name is Christa and I admit it — I'm a lifelong tanorexic'
By Christa D'Souza
Christa D'Souza
CHRISTA D'SOUZA/INSTAGRAM
Poor Ulrika. Folks do like to have a go, don't they? It takes a tanorexic to know one and yes, as someone born in 1960, that is what I am. If you were a teen in the Seventies you probably were too. What exacerbated the addiction — because that is probably what it is — is that I was so terribly good at it. Being of mixed heritage (my dad was Indian) I can almost, as it were, get brown under fluorescent light.
When I was a teen it was perfectly normal to want one's face to be the same shade of mahogany as one's body. (Hence putting tin foil up one's nostrils and facing the sun on a deckchair for hours.) It could be raining on holiday and I'd be out there by the pool wanting to be darker. You can never be too rich, too thin or too brown; that was the mantra of the Seventies and though I'm not saying I still hold by that, I'm also saying that I suppose it doesn't sound completely nuts.
In one way I wish I'd listened to my mother, who told me summer after summer I was ruining my skin (she herself at 82 has peachy skin. In fact a friendly immigration officer in Pakistan once told her she thought I was the mother, rather than the other way round). But in another it's a price I've always been willing to pay. They say you choose your face or your body. Well, it's crystal clear to any observer which way I swing. Absent of a face transplant or some very, very, very expensive surgery I'm always going to look my age (65).
Like Ulrika, I was always destined to be the peach kernel rather than the peach, for which I take full responsibility. My children, who both tend to dress like Shackleton on the beach, are always on at me about it. And I've got the whole season to toast slowly: we live part of the year in Greece, which means there's no rush. Soz, but I love the feeling of the sun on my face too much. And though I'll make some token efforts at the beginning of summer to cream up and wear a hat, ten days in I'll be out there bare-backed, just as I was in my teens and twenties. As for the damage I've wreaked over the years from other bad habits …
Like I said, poor Ulrika — and she's only 57, miles younger than me! My advice to her is that she does as I do: keep teetotal, attempt to stay in shape and style it out.