Author: Vincent Coëffé, Maître de conférences en géographie, Université d'Angers

If you’re lucky enough to have escaped to sunny shores of late, chances are your colleagues will have complimented you upon your return on your summer glow. Yet tanning as a fashionable practice is both a relatively recent historical phenomenon and one that varies according to place. In fact, sunbathing first became chic by accident, after Coco Chanel inadvertently caught too much sunshine on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. The photos of her disembarking from a yacht in Cannes set new beauty standards, which until then had associated darker skin tones with the lower classes’ outdoor toil. The utopia of…