What could be more beautiful to a salesperson than an omnipresent invisible threat necessitating a recurring purchase?
40% of the world's population lives between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. 50% live above the Tropic of Cancer including all of the US and all of Europe. In the early nineties, these two represented somewhere close to 70% of global GDP, and a relatively small portion of its total sunscreen need. Now we had an enormous unknown in just how much ultraviolet light would be able to make it through to the unsuspecting denizens of the perpetually gloomy lands of London and Seattle.
Large chemical manufacturers were gleefully funding research into the current and predicted effects of the eroding ozone layer. So long as they said what they wanted them to say they even publicly released them!
The youts, always unfazed by risk, and doubly so if the risk is some future consequence, took additional UV collection as a challenge. It wasn't uncommon to see young women "collecting rays" in 40 degree weather (4 degrees for those who prefer Swedish physicists to German ones). Young men would be seen nearby, collecting rays that had reflected off of the formerly mentioned collectors.
MTV had grown to be the cultural trendsetter for everyone under 30, and at the behest of its corporate sponsors, used its popular Spring Break programming in 1993 to highlight places that would never have been invaded by swimwear clad college students even half a decade before.
At Spring Break Duluth, Christina Aguilera debuted Crowdin' and Cloudin', the absolute banger of the season and year. In November of the same year, the European Union was formed. Whether as a reaction to US market dominance, or jealousy as to the pop artist's suggestion that the Midwest is where "the hips don't rest" is lost to the vagaries of time.