Australian designer brand Christopher Esber quietly removed Instagram posts of its latest swimwear campaign after backlash to the stark tan lines it showed off. Yikes.
A series of images posted to the brand’s social media on January 12 showed off its new Resort 23 Swimwear collection. The bikinis themselves were cute AF, but the models’ tans — significantly darker than the white skin under their straps — left viewers like myself in disbelief.
For one thing, the images appeared to glamourise tans obtained by cooking in the sun by associating them with luxury swimwear. I doubt this was intentional, but the effects remain the same.
It goes without saying that trying to get a sun tan is dangerous: the damage UV rays cause to your skin can lead to melanoma, one of the most aggressive and common cancers in Australia, and it’s not a practice we should encourage. There is no such thing as a safe sun tan.
MAFS
alumni was one of the people who called out the brand on her Instagram Stories and said the images disgusted her.
“The glamorising (sic) of THIS kind of culture makes me feel sick,” she wrote.
“I don’t care if this is makeup. It’s just not cool.
“Fan of the brand and have been for years. But I feel deeply that this campaign should be taken down.”
Christopher Esber’s Instagram pictures seem to be a product of this renewed trend of . Gone are the days of Slip Slop Slap and No Hat No Play: the selling of tanning oils, lotions, drops and gels to help pale women achieve the skin tone Black women and dark-skinned South Asian women like me are born with is rife, so of course we’re seeing more pics like these.
Influencers have also sharing pictures of themselves rubbing tanning oil onto skin like they’re about to deep fry in the flames of the sun, then bragging about how they look like they’re from a different race afterwards.
Something I want to point out though is that even if the tans being displayed in posts like Christopher Esber’s, or anyone else’s, weren’t “natural” or if they were just make-up/fake tan (therefore not dangerous), that doesn’t mean they would have been okay.
The promotion of sun baking isn’t the only problematic thing about dark tans: they also normalise black fishing.
If you aren’t across it, black fishing essentially refers to when white/non-Black people darken their skin and change their features to look ethnically ambiguous, mixed-race or Black. Usually this is cosmetically via fake tans that are waaaaaay darker than their natural skin tone, but it can include sun tans too if the tan is obtained on purpose to look darker.
As you can see in the first Christopher Esber image, one of the models’ skin tone makes her look like she could pass for Black or dark-skinned South Asian, yet the skin under her bikini is pale. Fucking YIKES.
There’s a wealth of information on why black fishing is harmful and reinforces racism, so I won’t get into that here, but I will say is this: dark tans like this are problematic racially, not just health-wise.
I’ve written previously about , fake or otherwise, and how it essentially a) commodifies brown skin, b) makes white women insecure about pale skin and then c) sells them the brown skin it commodified.
The kind of black fishing seen above also means brands just… hire white models who have altered their skin to be dark, rather than hiring dark-skinned models. It’s pretty cooked and dips into both black fishing and cultural appropriation, because while these skin tones are desirable on white women, they’re still seen as dirty on brown and Black women.
Christopher Esber has since removed the Instagram posts, but it hasn’t released a statement on why it uploaded them in the first place.
PEDESTRIAN.TV has reached out to Christopher Esber for comment.
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the problematic nature of tanning
