The Generation That Forgot Sunscreen
There’s a photo that a lot of us over 50 recognize from our own family albums. Someone’s stretched out on a lawn chair, glistening, chin tilted toward the sky like they’re trying to photosynthesize, with no umbrella, no shade, and almost certainly a bottle of baby oil sitting nearby in the grass. For a generation of Americans who came of age in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, a deep tan wasn’t a health concern. It was the goal, the proof that summer had actually happened to you, and the darker you got, the better off you felt about it. SPF wasn’t a number anyone chased. It was something your dermatologist mentioned once and you promptly forgot on the way to the lake.
Nobody was thinking about what any of it would look like in 30 years.
Baby Boomers were well known for their sunbathing habits, oftentimes without using any form of sun protection, and the culture around tanning made that feel entirely reasonable at the time. The Boomer generation swathed themselves in layers of Coppertone, or a mixture of baby oil and iodine, and soaked up the sun with reflective foil panels propped up on their chests, and they did it because every signal in the culture pointed them in that direction. Coppertone ads romanticized it. Celebrities wore a tan like a badge. The late 70s and 80s were a period when the tanning trend was, as one researcher put it, “on steroids,” and indoor tanning beds arrived in American malls and gyms to make sure the habit didn’t have to stop when summer did. Despite growing innovations in sunscreen during this time, most media still advertised that the best way to take care of your skin during the summer was with sunbathing, with tanning products claiming that sun would make your skin look younger and fresher.
The people who grew up outdoors here in Northern Colorado were doing the same thing everyone else was, just under a sun that hits harder than most people realize. Colorado averages around 300 days of sunshine a year, and at the elevation of the Front Range, that sunshine carries more punch. UV intensity increases by roughly 4 to 5 percent for every 1,000 feet of elevation gain, which means someone spending a summer at Horsetooth Reservoir in the 1980s was absorbing measurably more radiation than someone doing the same thing on a beach in Florida, and that’s before you factor in the agriculture, the construction, the roofing crews, and the farm workers across Weld County and the surrounding plains who spent their working lives outdoors without sunscreen as part of the job description. These weren’t people chasing a tan; they were just working, and the damage was accumulating without anyone keeping score.
A dermatologist at the University of Utah summed it up plainly: “Most of my patients who applied iodine or baby oil to tan have more skin cancers, wrinkles and sunspots than my patients who did not.” That’s not a surprising finding when you understand what baby oil does to the skin’s exposure. It has an SPF of zero and acts as a magnifier, drawing UV radiation deeper into the skin rather than deflecting any of it. The generation that used it regularly across their teens, 20s, and 30s essentially gave UV damage a running head start, and the science that would have stopped them from doing it arrived too late to matter much. The link between UV exposure and skin cancer became clearer through the late 80s and into the 90s, but by then, most Baby Boomers already had 20 or 30 years of unprotected exposure behind them.
More than 70 percent of melanoma cases are now being diagnosed in people over 55, the same generation that spent their youth baking in baby oil, and the numbers behind that trend are hard to look away from. People in their 60s and 70s are now over five times more likely to be diagnosed with malignant melanoma than their parents’ generation was 30 years ago, with melanoma rates rising from 7 cases per 100,000 people in the mid-1970s to 36 cases per 100,000 today. In Colorado specifically, melanoma is the fifth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the state, and roughly 117 Coloradans die from it every year. Those aren’t abstract statistics for a lot of families along the Front Range. They’re neighbors, parents, and lifelong residents of communities that spent generations working and playing outdoors without a second thought about what the sun was quietly putting in motion.
What makes this especially worth paying attention to now is that UV damage doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates silently over years, sometimes showing up first as actinic keratosis, a rough, scaly patch on the skin that develops from years of UV exposure and is considered precancerous. It doesn’t look dramatic, it often doesn’t hurt, and people dismiss it for years because it seems minor, which is exactly the problem. Left unaddressed, it can progress to squamous cell carcinoma, and what could have been a simple conversation becomes a much more complicated one. The estimated five-year survival rate for patients whose melanoma is detected early is over 99 percent, but when the disease metastasizes to distant organs, that rate drops to 35 percent, which is why the gap between catching something early and catching it late is about as consequential as a medical gap gets.
One in five Americans will develop skin cancer by age 70, and the generation with the heaviest sun exposure history is now squarely in the window where that risk is most real. The good news is that a yearly skin check isn’t complicated, it isn’t time-consuming, and it’s the single most practical thing someone with decades of unprotected sun exposure can do for themselves right now. For Northern Colorado residents, skin cancer screening in Northern Colorado is available at Front Range Dermatology across six locations, including Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Windsor, Johnstown, and Fort Morgan. They see patients who’ve spent a lifetime under the Colorado sun, and they know what to look for.
Nobody’s blaming anyone for what they didn’t know, because the information wasn’t there, the culture pointed one direction, and nearly everyone followed. The only thing that matters now is what gets done with what we know, and what we know is that a yearly skin check takes about as long as an oil change(and is arguably way more important) and can catch something that’s genuinely worth catching early.