The 80s Club

Golden could well be an apt description of the 80s- not just in terms of wealth, but also in looks. The well-tanned body was prized, and no one was much concerned with things like skin cancer. The hapless souls who attempted to use self-tanners instead of laying out in the sun or spending hours in the salons, didn’t have a lot of product options to choose among. The only one I remember seeing on the shelf by all the glorious yummy coconut-scented oils, is QT.

Unless you were somewhat orange-colored naturally, there was absolutely no way you could use QT and not look like you’d fallen into a dye vat. Abe Gardea writes:

As Jeremy searched for the best self tanning lotion he went through all kinds of trial and error tests. The first one he managed to discover was the old Coppertone QT ? Quick Tanning Lotion. He knew that Coppertone was one of the best brands in tanning for a very long time and that QT was the first ever self tanning lotion, introduced in 1960. He decided that if it was the first it must be the best. He was wrong, as anyone who has ever seen the results of QT can attest to. This stuff turned him as orange as an Oompa Loompa.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive article on Dihydroxyacetone, and includes this bit:

Coppertone introduced the first consumer sunless tanning lotion into the marketplace in the 1960’s. This product was called “Quick Tan” or “QT”. It was sold as an overnight tanning agent, and other companies followed with similar products. Consumers soon tired of this product due to unattractive results such as orange palms, streaking and poor coloration. Because of the QT experience, many people today still associate sunless tanning with fake-looking orange tans.

In today’s cancer-conscious market, you can find many products for sunless tanning which work far better than QT ever did, for skin tones of all types, as well as sunscreens. You can even buy an airbrush tanning machine!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Gnarly Fashion, The 80s Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.