About

#SunburnArt is a social media hashtag for photographs of sunburned skin with areas that have been purposely covered up with sunblock, stickers or clothing to create various designs and shapes.

Origin

The earliest known use of the #SunburnArt hashtag was in a tweet posted by @MeowSyz^[1] on January 27th, 2014, which featured a photograph of a woman's back with a floral sunburn design (shown below).

Spread

On April 9th, 2014, Twitter user @MauraGrierson^[2] posted a photograph of a woman with several purposely designed tan lines with the hashtag #SunBurnArt (shown below, left). On May 29th, Instagram^[4] user bbear420 uploaded a photo of a back sunburn created with a marker illustration (shown below, right).

On July 1st, 2015, The Daily Mail^[6] published an article about the trend, noting that dermatologists warn the practice could cause skin cancer. On the following day, The Independent^[5] published an article accusing online news sites of perpetuating the sunburn art trend. Also on July 2nd, the Skin Cancer Foundation's senior vice president Deborah Sarnoff released a statement urging people to avoid sunburns at all costs in response to the sunburn art photos.^[7] On July 3rd, YouTuber FunnyMeNow uploaded a video in which he gets the poop emoji sunburned on to his butt (shown below). On July 6th, BuzzFeed^[3] published a compilation of Instagram photos with the hashtag #sunburntattoo.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References