Not to inflict such torture on anyone, but here's a task: picture Donald Trump. Chances are you’re imagining the former US president’s trademark features: the MAGA hat, the blonde hair, the permanently tanned skin. Over the years, the Republican presidential nominee's skin has been the source of much mockery; most cartoons of Trump show him bright orange, as do Trump fancy dress costumes, while Alec Baldwin opted for a heavy, darker shade of make-up while playing him on Saturday Night Live.
Over the years, it’s been claimed that Trump uses both tanning beds and spray tans to assume his hue – the lighter colour around his eyes has, accordingly to some, been chalked down to wearing goggles during those processes. Recently, former Republican Liz Cheney (who is now campaigning for Vice President Democratic candidate Kamala Harris), alluded to the orange hue of Trump’s skin. ‘I was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning,’ she said. However, it’s also been reported that Trump has been looking decidedly less orange in recent years, perhaps in an attempt to shake his ‘reality show president’ image.
In the run-up to the US presidential election, Trump has been on our screens more than ever, leading people to ask just why Donald Trump is orange – and it’s not the first time. In her 2018 book, former aide Omarosa Manigault claimed that Trump fired a staff member for failing to set up a tanning bed at the White House properly. That same year, former FBI director James Comey also addressed Trump’s skin tone in his own memoir. He described how the politician’s ‘face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles’.
His former military school classmates have previously claimed that Trump would plug in an ultraviolet tanning bulb to ‘go to the beach’ (via The Washington Post), but early photos of Trump tend to show a much paler man than the one we see today. Trump appears to have started wearing make-up more regularly around 2012 on The Apprentice and surrounding TV appearances, meaning he was under the bright lights and cameras a lot more frequently.
In a recent interview, a make-up artist Kriss Blevens, who has worked on every President since Jimmy Carter – including Trump – theorised that the colour came from self-tanner. ‘Because I have done Trump’s makeup several times, I can tell you that, at times, his face looked bronzer than the rest of him, and that was before makeup,’ she told Fast Company. ‘My guess was he relied on some self-tanners to try to maintain a certain look that he’d come to feel healthy in from living in Florida.’
Trump’s team have previously rejected claims that the former reality star gets spray tans or uses sun beds. In 2019, an anonymous White House source, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, insisted to The New York Times that his shade was all down to ‘good genes’.