"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away."
Elvis Presley, singer
When the legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel inadvertently developed a suntan during a Mediterranean cruise in the 1920s, tanned skin immediately became synonymous with beauty, fashion, and a healthy lifestyle. When the Popular Front won the 1936 French general elections and legislated for annual paid holidays, people began to spend more of their time in the sun. In response to increasing French demands for a product to assist in the tanning process/the' French chemist and founder of L'Oreal, Eugene Schueller (1881-1957), created "Bellis," the world's first sunscreen lotion. Its effectiveness in the prevention of skin cancers, however, was poor when compared with modern formulations, and many early attempts at tanning lotions amounted to nothing more than crude oil- based pastes. Twenty-six years would pass before the chemist Franz Greiter introduced the Sun Protection Factor (SPF) in 1962, the first real attempt to grade a sunscreen's effectiveness at blocking the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Schueller began experimenting at home with chemicals responsible for color pigmentation in 1903. He found the chemicals became permanently absorbed into human hair when mixed with ammonia and peroxide. In 1907 he successfully began to market his new synthetic hair-coloring formula to Parisien hairdressers under the name Aureole. The first mass- produced suntan lotion was a combination of jasmine and cocoa butter, mixed in an old granite coffee pot in 1944 by the Florida-based pharmacist Benjamin Green, a researcher with the Coppertone Company.
