I'm Aviva Carter and I'm going to tell you how I went from this to the color you see now without letting any harmful aging sunlight touch my skin. I live like a vampire and I don't look like paste and you can too. We tend to think of skin color along a single axis from pale to tan, but really there are two axes, the melanin axis and the carotenoid axis.
Old me would have fallen low on both axes, low melanin and low carotenoid. Other people have low melanin, high carotenoid, and some people have high melanin, high carotenoid. Carotenoids are the yellow, orange, and red pigments that are found in many fruits and vegetables. The interesting thing about this is that the more quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables we eat, the more they accumulate in our skin and the more color our skin gets.
Not only that, but there's a surprising amount of research going into skin color and how it affects attractiveness and the perception of health. And appreciation for melanin suntanning is culturally dependent. They found that people from western societies rate images of people who have more of a melanin tan as being more attractive and healthier looking. But people from East Asian or African cultures tend to rate images of people with more of a melanin tan as being less attractive and less healthy looking.
But the crazy thing is that people from all races and cultures tested found people who have more of a carotenoid coloration to be healthier looking and more attractive. It's the secret to why some people just glow. It's like we're displaying the richness of our diet on our skin like a trophy. So to get a carotenoid tan you could eat heaps of vegetables and I certainly do eat a healthy amount of vegetables. but to hack the system even more, I take carotenoid supplements.
Now there are sunless tanning products specifically on the market for this purpose, but they generally are high in beta-carotene, which from personal experience I find makes your skin look unnatural and yellow. I find the red pigments astaxanthin and lycopene to impart a much more natural and attractive color to the skin. Personally, I take 24 milligrams of astaxanthin and 50 milligrams of lycopene, and doing that it took about two months or so for my skin to start changing color.
And it's subtle, but people never told me that my skin was glowing before, and now they do. And it's not just for looks either. Both astaxanthin and lycopene have been shown to prevent sunburn and UV damage in the skin.
And I'll make a video about that soon. But carotenoids are one of three things that I do to change my skin color without sun exposure. Subscribe for a video on the other two.