Men Are Tanning Again. I Got a $500 Spray Tan—And Now I Understand Why

Along with the resurgence of aughts style, tanning has seeped back into the zeitgeist. I investigated the least-damaging way to achieve the look.“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!One throughline between every tan man I spoke to is the belief that tans suggest something about you as a person. “It is a signifier that you’re touching grass, so to speak,” explains Harvey. “You can only get [tan] outside, which is also maybe part of the reason why tanning is trending among young people, who feel so distinctly out of touch with the natural world.” To Jesse Neiman, a natural-tanning enthusiast in his 20s, a tan suggests “health, wealth, and leisure.” In his view, staying tan telegraphs that you exercise outdoors, or can afford beach and ski vacations, or are not chained to a desk 24/7 (or all of the above). “ There are these subliminal messages that a tan body sends in a world where signaling is everything,” says Neiman.Coco says the entire spray tan industry is “experiencing a boom,” in large part because people know the dangers of actual UV exposure. In other words, with one appointment, you can feel healthy, wealthy, and leisurely with none of the risk. Eager to find out, I scheduled my own appointment with the self-described pioneer of mobile tanning. (He also has the best email signature I’ve ever seen: “Glowing, Jimmy.”) When he started out in the early aughts, he says, he was one of the only at-home spray tanners around. His career developed with a procession of celebrity clients, including cast members from Desperate Housewives, then Khloe Kardashian, who introduced him to the rest of her family. He says he’s worked with Kim Kardashian for well over a decade, calling her his “rock.” Kylie Jenner has tagged Coco on her Met Gala Instagram posts for several years running. Today, he says, he counts himself among seven or eight people who routinely tan A-list celebrities.A Jimmy Coco spray tan does not resemble stepping into a booth at a chain salon. For our session, Coco lugged multiple Pelican cases full of gear up to my second-story apartment. He flies to clients with his entire kit, be it for a one-day job in Berlin or a two-week trip to Turks and Caicos. He spray tans some celebrity clients once or twice a week to ensure they are never caught camera-unready.At first, Coco wanted to give me a subtle, “healthy” tan. After a few months of summer, my biceps were a completely different shade from my forearms, and he thought we should even everything out. But after some discussion, we determined that my first spray tan should be the real deal. The final result is dependent on both the mixture Coco loads into his sprayer and the amount of time it stays on your skin before you shower. After some consideration, Coco settled on a formulation he calls OG, what he says is Kylie Jenner’s former favorite, which develops fast and lasts about five days. (It’s called OG because Coco has since developed a new recipe using erythrulose, an ingredient found in berries that lasts longer and slowly darkens over three days after application.) He also adds hyaluronic acid and other products to the blend to leave your skin feeling moisturized and smooth.Coco erected a seven-foot tent in my living room and plugged in his sprayer, which looks like an airbrush gun attached to a fog machine. I stripped down to my boxer briefs and applied sticky pads to the soles of my feet. Coco took care to adjust the angle and height of my underwear’s legs, noting that crisp, defined tan lines are one of the best parts of a tan. He turned on the machine. It was loud, like we were inflating a bouncy house in my apartment.Coco began quite literally painting on my tan, moving the airbrush in swoops around my body. He added a subtle line down my torso to imply the presence of abs. He contoured my jawline for extra definition. Then he told me to shut my eyes and hold my breath while he did my face. I asked if it was dangerous to breathe it in. He assured me that if it caused an issue, Kim would have had it by now.The attention to detail was immaculate. Coco repeatedly stepped back, examining me like a painting on an easel. I spun around and contorted myself while he tanned my nooks and crannies: behind my knees, under my chin, between my fingers. Coco says the mark of a truly expert spray tan is correctly toned hands. (Dry skin absorbs the spray tan faster, which can leave hands and knuckles looking unevenly dark.) He even wiped off my finger- and toenails with an alcohol swab. The entire process took less than 20 minutes in all, a leisurely pace for Coco. Oftentimes, he is racing to finish so a star can move on to hair, makeup, a fitting, and the rest of their glam routine.A typical Coco spray tan costs $500, compared to $69 at the national chain Sugared + Bronzed. And that’s if you can get on the calendar. Coco says he recently had to reschedule a supermodel because his longtime client Heidi Klum asked for the same appointment. He also has his own line of face and body self-tanner, Sunless, which he formulated based on his spray tan recipes.In recent years, Coco says he has been tanning more men than ever for red carpet events. Many tan their entire body, even if they plan to cover it in clothes. “When you have a spray tan and everything’s even, and you can see the shadows of your muscles and the contours, then while you’re putting on that really expensive shirt or jacket or jeans or whatever, you feel great about how you look,” he says. “Even though you can’t see the spray tan underneath the tuxedo, the confidence from that is oozing out.”I put my clothes back on, Coco left for the airport, and I waited four hours to take my first shower. He had warned me to use soap only where I needed it, minimize scrubbing, and pat myself dry, in order to extend the life of the tan. When I stepped out, the tan had lightened noticeably and I liked the way I looked. Exactly one decade ago, at age 18, I worked as a lifeguard at a sleepaway camp. The job required me to be shirtless and on the lake, all day every day. I finished that summer perfectly sun-kissed, with the outline of a life jacket seared onto my torso. This was the tannest I’d been since. Even though I knew it was synthetic, I still felt transported back to a time when I spent three months without touching a laptop or paying a bill or wearing socks. I felt like I touched grass.As I went about my life, I eagerly awaited people’s reactions. But Coco had warned me they might not come. “The tans look so natural now that people aren’t necessarily coming up to you saying, ‘Wow, great tan,’” he said. “They're saying, ‘Wow, you look incredible.’” To my eyes, my tan did look real, albeit impeccable. The perfectly even tone from my insteps to my armpits could be achieved only if I’d laid on the beach on a rotisserie spit. Still, multiple people complimented me, or at least noticed something was different. At my annual physical, my doctor asked, “How much are you exercising?” then immediately added, “I can see you’re getting some sun.”The most important person to please was my girlfriend. “Girlfriends love a tan boyfriend,” says Coco. Fact check: partially true. The night after my spray tan, she made me sleep separately, burrito-rolled inside a $20 polyester sheet from Amazon, so I didn’t stain our good bedding. My comically pale-by-comparison butt was also a source of amusement for her. But, dining alfresco with me in our neighborhood, she said I was so tan that it felt like we were on a tropical vacation.About a week after my appointment, right on schedule, my tan began sloughing off in the shower. Every scrub with the soap bar resurfaced a new splotch of pasty skin. After seven days of perfect caramel color, I had forgotten my natural eggshell shade. It was jarring. As I was reintroduced to myself in the mirror, I realized that I had become habituated to the spay tan. I started, at some unconscious level, to think it was real. Suddenly, I understood why Coco’s customers maintain a perma-sprayed state.The spray tan doesn’t only trick others into thinking that you enjoy a healthy, wealthy, leisurely lifestyle. The trick works on your own mind, too. When the tan rinsed off, I felt myself undergoing some small metamorphosis from Tan Charlie back to Normal Charlie. It was like the end of vacation, the end of summer. I was back to reality.Charlie Sosnick is a freelance writer based in New York, covering internet subcultures, men’s health, and food. He has self-published three books and written three short films. ... Read More