How Do You Tan With Fair Skin?

What Is It About Fair Skin That Makes Tanning Difficult?

Fair-skinned people don’t have much melanin relative to their darker-skinned compatriots who also have an easier time tanning.

You’ve heard of melanin, which is the chemical your body produces and embeds within your skin to protect your skin from ultraviolet radiation damage.

Melanin is a pigment which is very dark, and its main purpose is to absorb the light that hits your body so that UV rays don’t penetrate into your skin and potentially cause DNA damage and skin damage.

The counterbalance of melanin is that your body needs a small amount of UV energy in order to create vitamin D in addition to other critical biological chemicals like melatonin, which regulates your sleep cycle.

Fair skin and pale skin are inherited genetically from your parents, but also take cues from your environment and your actions.

Your genetics determine the baseline level of melanin production, whereas your actions influence the short to medium term spikes in melanin production which we call tanning.

This means that there is no way to get a permanent tan or burn, though with enough sun exposure pale skinned people or fair skinned people may develop sunspots, moles, and if taken to excess, skin cancer.

Here’s a quick skin type guide to determine what you have.

If you have type 1 skin – this post is for you.

Managing Melanin

If you live on a higher latitude, your skill will naturally become paler because your body has less access to sunlight each day, and needs to make the most out of every UV ray that it can catch.

In contrast, if you live near the Equator, your skin will be deluged by the sun at all times—far more than it needs to fulfill the biological processes that use UV energy to produce Vitamin D.

As a result, your skin will increase its level of melanin production, which is responsible for the darkening of your skin which we call tanning.

The more frequently you’re exposed to the sun beyond your skin’s ability to protect itself with melanin, the more melanin will be produced so that you’ll be in better shape the next time around.

This means that building melanin is a process of getting sunburns or having close calls with sunburn.

In general, people with fair skin or pale skin walk the line between lightly tanning and burning during their tanning efforts, which we’ll talk more about in the next section.

What Kind Of Tan Can You Expect With Pale Skin?

To tan with fair skin requires a lot of patience and also alertness. A high quality tanning oil can be helpful because it can accelerate the tanning process while reducing your exposure to ultraviolet rays beyond what your skin is capable of dealing with.

To be the best tan for pale skin, expect to take things slowly, use sunscreen, and expect to have to take time off from tanning cycles when you accidentally get a light or moderate sunburn (unless you want some gnarly tan lines).

Tanning cycles are periods of time spent in the sun counterbalanced by periods of time spent away from the sun as much as possible. If you have fair skin, you will need to perform many short tanning cycles to build up a tan.

As mentioned previously, tanning with fair or pale skin is likely to result in skin tags, sun spots, or moles, which are concentrated pockets of melanin that are typically permanent.

Skin tags and moles are defined as benign tumors, and the vast majority of these freckles are harmless, but anyone with fair skin who is going to be devoting a lot of time to tanning should expect to see a lot of these little buggers crop up.

The rule is that if a new skin tag or mole is even in shape and surface gradient, it’s almost certainly fine. If a new mole or skin tag is large, lumpy, changes from day to day, and extremely dark, you should make your way directly to the dermatologist and stop all tanning efforts immediately—melanoma is no joke.