“Our Age of Bronze is collapsing,” warns Odysseus, in the summer blockbuster of the year.
Maybe for the Ithacans. But if you look around the world of men’s style, bronzed is back. Matt Damon seems to have kept his Mediterranean glow for the whole Odyssey press tour. Yung Lean went to Paris Fashion Week looking downright sun-kissed. A J.Crew summer campaign featured models as scantily clad camp counselors with a laissez-faire approach to sunscreen. In 2020, Timothée Chalamet lamented to GQ that he looked “all pale” in paparazzi photos of him on a boat, but in a beach photo shoot this year, he had some nice color. Erling Haaland posted his cherry red nose and captioned it: ☀️
All this celebrity sun worship might mark a turning point after a decade of warnings about sun exposure reached a fever pitch. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that everyone use sunscreen every day on all skin not covered by clothing to reduce the risk of skin cancer. Around Covid, as people were shut indoors staring at their own faces on Zoom, obsessive sun protection went mainstream. Search interest in “sunscreen” spiked noticeably in 2021, then kept growing to its 2026 peak, alongside social media-fueled growth in the broader skin care industry. Guys who once applied sunscreen only at the beach now seem to use it as religiously as toothpaste. First dates are liable to ask about your skin care routine. Forgetting your SPF for one day, it appears, condemns you to a life hideously marred by dark spots and premature wrinkles.
Against that backdrop, tanning can be a form of rebellion. “It’s seductive in the same way cigarettes are,” says Bill Harvey, 31, who has been actively tanning for the past three years. “There’s an aesthetic quality to it, and it’s a little taboo, but everyone agrees it looks cool.”
The stars concur. “ People want you to think that they’ve been out, living a life of leisure, laying out in the sun, relaxing, and creating these tan lines,” says Jimmy Coco, an LA-based spray tanner whose clients include Kylie and Kendall Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike, and Nick Offerman. Coco says that roughly half of his celebrity clients today are men, up from essentially zero when he started in 2004. “I wish I could mention all my male clients, but people are funny with their spray tans sometimes.”
Perhaps the male-tanning renaissance might also be attributed to the whims of fashion and the resurgence of aughts style. Commenters compared J.Crew’s Camp Crew, with its tanned, carefree models, to Hollister and Abercrombie ads of yore. Benito Skinner recently wore a 2000s mall-nostalgia look replete with bleached hair and a tan. Harvey says his desire to be tan is “definitely a Y2K holdover in me.” But the half dozen avid male tanners I talked to also cited decidedly modern influences: Some referenced the podcaster Andrew Huberman, who advocates for morning sun exposure. Others had tried Melanotan II, an injectable peptide that makes skin darker and has drawn warnings from the Skin Cancer Foundation. One had even experimented with butthole and genital sunning; he reported that “ you’ll notice the benefits almost instantly,” but “ it’s very easy to get burnt.” Ouch!