It’s easy to mistaken tanning lotion with a sun block type product when in actuality it’s the other way around. Tanning lotion is not a sun block and offers zero protection from the sun. In fact, the purpose of tanning lotion is to increase your skins sensitivity to the ultraviolet rays which stimulates melanin production, thus, the name indoor tanning totion as most skins are required to stay indoors or risk over burning with the use of tanning lotion. For those people who have had cosmetic surgery face lifts, indoor tanning lotions are the only way to go since they can’t take in excessive UV rays for a while.

Many products also serve as a skin moisturizer, and why not when every skin could use more moistening. But it does not serve as a sun block. One person mentioned that everyone at the beach uses tanning lotion. No. Everyone at the beach may use sun block, if everyone at the beach used tanning lotions you might think a disease had gone viral eating at human skin.

So, to my non-Caucasian friends whose skin continuously produces melanin pigments, its understandable why you wouldn’t know exactly what tanning lotion does. But when white people ask what self-tanning solutions are good don’t make assumptions when you clearly never used a product or contributed to the bajillion dollar industry designed to take advantage of our western culture’s ridiculous obsession with tanned skin.