3 types of tans and what they mean

Find out what type of tan you have

At any given point in time, a person can have one, two, or three types of tans.

A tan does more than make you pretty and sun-kissed

There are 3 kinds of tans, and they each mean different things.

In today’s post, you can learn what each of the 3 different kinds of tans are, what they mean, how tans are made by the body, how to use tans as landmarks of health, and tips for optimizing safe solar exposure for yourself and your family.

First tan type: Unchanging skin tone (and hair color)

The first kind of tan doesn’t vary based on lifestyle.

This “tan” is made from the pigment melanin.

Human’s surface-level melanin comes in two primary types you can see in the skin and hair.

• eumelanin: brown/black

• pheomelanin: red/yellow

In humans, there are 120 genes that have been identified as affecting skin and hair pigmentation (so far).

This shows how skin and hair color can have such a huge amount of subtlety from person to person.

This variety of melanin genes plus lifestyle gives each of us our unique balance of the stereotypic white/black/yellow/red skin tones, as well as what in the cosmetic industry is referred to as undertone.

Your natural hair color shows your melanin status

The pigmentation information in skin and hair tells us a lot about each other—not just about our race and ancestry, but also our health.

Our hair, far from being “dead matter,” as I remember being taught, is actually an active part of our body’s tanning/melanation processes.

Hair keeps a record of your melanin status over time, and has the ability to send melanin back into your body when it needs it¹.

Thus, hair color is not just pretty, but a storage center for valuable melanin.

Grey hair shows the body has been pulling melanin in from the hair to use deeper in the body.

With regard to hair, we (and especially babies) also have lots of fuzzy white hair over most of the body.

This hair doesn’t have much pigment and is very soft, but it still may relate to your tannability.

It’s called vellus hair, and recent research suggests vellus hair is specially designed to absorb UV light², possibly as much as 250x as much as normal hair³.

Isn’t it interesting that babies, then, are covered in vellus hair?

This means we seem to be born designed to absorb UV light at an extremely rapid rate—maybe because babies can’t be outside as long due to being more vulnerable to heat and dehydration and need to meet their UV needs quickly.

I also wonder how the modern hair-removal obsession affects health, given it removes both the melanin storage/release capabilities in the pigmented hair and the UV antennae-like abilities of the unpigmented vellus hair.

We also know in the animal kingdom, for example songbirds, melanin relates to physical qualities associated with reproductive ability and that are also used in mate selection⁴.

Thus, fake hair color likely confuses the accurate transmission of biological messages about of health and genetics carried by melanin in humans.

Not only that, but frequent use of hair dyes may reduce natural melanin production in hair follicles⁵, which definitely sounds like a vicious cycle for someone trying to cover up or reverse greying hair.

How your skin’s undertone affects your solar callus:

In scientific terms, people’s skin tone is one of three:

• darkly pigmented

• depigmented

• facultatively pigmented (ie, tannable, which is especially useful for living between 23-46 degrees latitude)

But in cosmetics, we know there is more to it. As there are so many genes involved, we also have an undertone to our skin that can be described as cool, warm, and neutral.

When we are correlating these scientific/cosmetic qualities to exposure to sunlight, the Fitzpatrick scale can be useful.

It is simply based on individual subjective experiences of how one’s skin responds to sunlight:

• Type I: doesn’t tan, always burns (depigmented)

• Type II: tans poorly (tannable)

• Type III: tans after initial burn (tannable)

• Type IV: tans easily (tannable)

• Type V: always tans, never burns (darkly pigmented)

The Fitzpatrick scale is what the Dminder app for estimating UV exposure & Vitamin D production by location, time, and skin type uses.

Parenting tip for using Dminder app: set the skin type a shade or two lighter when your baby is young so your timers go off earlier, especially if baby is born later in the sun season and everyone else has already been tanning earlier in the year

While we think of only fair-skinned people as being able to sunburn, due to many factors in the modern lifestyle, even darkly-pigmented skin can get a painful burn if sunlight exposure suddenly increases (such as a winter vacation to a tropical location).

As one reader shared:

Interesting write ups you're doing on circadian rhythms and the effect of sunlight on our overall wellbeing.  Your last post especially on sunbathing is quite a read. The level of detail regarding skin types and the awareness of the intensity of the sun, for example, is something I never had to think about. Growing up in Nigeria, sunscreen just wasn't/isn't a thing. I joked that "black people don't burn", until I went cycling for 2 hours in Panama last fall and was horrified when I got into the shower - the horrors of the clear demarcation in skin tones. I stand corrected. I could go on about all those topics. I've become more aware of my body, sensations and sensitivities to blue light, my sleep patterns, foods etc and their effects on my mood and overall balance and well-being.

~Brighter Days, Darker Nights reader

Second tan type: Inflammation tan 🥵