Remember when lounging in the sun was a legitimate activity? When the fantasy was living in a Bain de Soleil ad, all bandeau bikini and glistening bronzed skin? Oh, look! Here comes a waiter delivering a bottle of fine wine and a tube of Orange Gelée S.P.F. 2. You can almost taste the vices.
There’s no lounging now. If you happen to recline by a pool for a moment, your fitness tracker will badger you about standing up. And that’s the least of it. There’s also no glistening whatsoever. Instead, you are ghosting, covered in so much white goo and/or sun-protective clothing that you might as well be wearing a hazmat suit.
No one wants to go back to those times exactly, what with the skin cancer and the wrinkles. But wouldn’t it be great if you could have your bake and cheat it, too? The makers of sunscreen are trying to recapture the romance of those carefree, languid days and mix that feeling into their protective formulas.
Let’s cut to the chase: Bain de Soleil is back. Not by the same name or original formula, which is available on eBay for hundreds of dollars. (I have two untouched tubes stashed away in case I fall on hard times.) Vacation, the campy sunscreen line, just re-invented the Orange Gelée with one big difference: S.P.F. 30.
Lach Hall and Dakota Green cooked up the Vacation brand when they were living in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in 2020. “We spent a lot of time on the beach, as you can imagine, drinking piña coladas and wearing a lot of sunscreen,” Hall tells me. As if to prove his commitment to the bit, he’s dressed in swimshorts and a T-shirt for our meeting as he sits in front of a tropical Zoom background. “We started to think, Why is sunscreen so boring when it’s used in places that are so fun?”
You can blame that sad situation on the 90s, when the dangers of sun exposure became all too clear and sunscreens acquired a medicinal demeanor. The F.D.A. classifies them as over-the-counter drugs—and they look it.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your bake and cheat it, too?
One of the first lotions to break that clinical dullness came from Supergoop, which named its first product Play. When it launched, in 2005, sunscreens were “an icky, sticky, pasty mess,” says Holly Thaggard, the brand’s founder. “My early inspiration was to … give the consumer something that feels amazing on the skin, that’s multi-functional with lots of benefits, and then sneak the S.P.F. in there.”
Thaggard also changed the cadence of sunscreen from “when you were at the beach or in a bikini” to a year-round everyday necessity. She then moved the sunscreen out of the drugstore and into the skin-care aisles of upscale stores.
Thaggard realized early in the game that “a product has to look good on your shelf if you’re going to reach for it daily and embrace it.… It really needs to have a cool factor.” The Supergoop packaging is clean and bright, with a predominance of sunny yellow. “It needs to be something that’s sexy.”
Ding-ding-ding!
The Supergoop Glow Oil, for one, gives the skin that warm glisten that’s been absent from sunscreens for so long. “There’s nothing sexier than healthy, glowing skin,” Thaggard tells me. Supergoop now offers more than 45 different varieties, mineral and chemical, tinted and clear, matte and glittery—and everything in between.
The Vacation sunscreens are fully focused on nostalgia and fun, with only a passing mention of health. “It’s interesting to me that sunscreen became so devoid of any kind of pleasure,” Hall says. One of the Vacation offerings looks like Reddi-wip, right down to the nozzle. There’s a Chardonnay Oil with S.P.F. 30, which Hall describes proudly as “very bougie.” If you ever coated your body with baby oil, cradled a reflector under your chin, and sat motionless until you turned the color of a honey-baked ham, then Vacation Baby Oil may give you unnerving flashbacks. But the difference is its S.P.F. 30. “The idea is to make something that you actually look forward to wearing,” he says, calling it “a guilty pleasure.”
None of these sunscreens look as if they could possibly protect your skin. And yet oil, gel, and even whipped cream allow a smooth, even application, spreading the active ingredients without a lot of rubbing. Besides, any dermatologist will tell you that the best sunscreen is the one you actually want to wear.
The scent in these bottles is further enticement, transporting the wearer into a travel-brochure state of mind. Vacation worked with perfumers to capture that particular blend of coconut, banana, and aloe vera, adding notes of inflatable pool toys, chlorine, and damp swimsuit Lycra. It’s the scent of Vacation’s Classic Lotion and its eau de toilette, which is now one of the top-selling fragrances at Nordstrom. The idea, says Hall, “is to make you look, feel, and smell like you’re in paradise.”
There’s a yearning for the retro seduction of those glamorous European sunscreens that weren’t really sunscreens at all: Piz Buin Tan Accelerating Oil, Lancaster Golden Tan Maximizer, and the daddy of them all, Bain de Soleil, for the St. Tropez tan. When Bain de Soleil went kaput, in 2019, petitions circulated online from people begging the manufacturer to revive it. That’s when the team at Vacation got busy. They gathered fans of the original and asked them to test each new product submission, helping the company determine the scent, texture, color, design, and S.P.F. level. Before its launch, in late March, it had more than 15,000 people on the waitlist.
Sunscreen nostalgia pulls us back to a time when we may have been more innocent and certainly were more clueless, before we hid under beach umbrellas, before we parked our children in portable tents for the afternoon, before a trip to the tropics included a degree of anxiety, before we stripped down at the dermatologist’s office for a full-body skin exam. Now we can recapture that sense of pleasure without the health-destroying consequences. It smells a little bit like freedom.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look