I Think It’s Time to Talk About Testicular Tan
I’m not sure who decided Tucker Carlson is the person to listen to when you want to learn how to be more manly (it was probably Tucker Carlson), but recently this guy teased an upcoming documentary on the subject with clips. which include the concept of “testicular tan”.
From time to time I come across things people talk about on fitness, wellness or biohacking forums that seem ready to be debunked, except that the idea isn’t common enough for Lifehacker yet. Sunbathing, or better yet, putting them under a panel of red lights for $1,649, is the latest hack to avoid my mental list of “at least I don’t have to write about it.”
So is there a “tremendous benefit” to exposing your bag to red light, as mentioned in Carlson’s clip? Well, there are many benefits that people claim from the practice, but real science has failed to back them up. The companies that sell the light and the biohackers that praise it tend to cite a few animal, test tube, or human studies that don’t specifically address testosterone, the testes, or the scrotum.
So how can tanning your testicles help you? One hypothesis is that red light helps the mitochondria produce more ATP, which helps the Leydig cells in the testes produce more testosterone. Another hypothesis has to do with vitamin D, which some studies have shown is low in men with low testosterone levels.
But there are problems with these ideas. To name one obvious one, vitamin D is not specifically produced in the skin of the scrotum. You can increase it by sunbathing on any part of your body of your choice, or simply by eating more foods containing vitamin D, such as oily fish.
And when it comes to the effects of red light on mitochondria, that may be true—in skin cells . The testicles are internal organs and light does not penetrate more than a few millimeters through the skin. There are light therapy treatments that work on the skin , but there really is no plausible way to increase testosterone production in your testicles just because light falls on the skin of the scrotum.
So why do some guys think this should work? The proponent of light therapy in the video clip, Andrew McGovern, was probably right when he said that people take what he calls “bromeopathy” when they “do not trust conventional information.” This seems accurate to me, and it’s a phenomenon that fuels all sorts of pseudo-scientific practices, as I saw first hand when I went to the Goop summit for health advice . It’s the same thing over and over again. Lighting up your balls is like a secret health hack that doctors don’t want you to know about, and yet you can do it yourself for free with the sun. Or you can feel like an expert researching light therapy devices and then checking email and calling your mom while standing in front of one with your pants down , as biohacker Ben Greenfield described his experience.
It also probably feels a bit special and edgy. Remember a few years ago the lady who posed on Instagram ” sunbathing [her] ass and yoni “? She said that “[as] a woman, it connected me more to my uterine space”, which to me sounds very similar to Greenfield enthusiastically feeling “a unique heavenly, warm, tingling glow in my perineum” and then great spent the night with my partner.
So there you have it: testicle tanning secrets revealed. Just don’t be surprised when the next trend goes in the opposite direction, like sitting with an ice pack on your scrotum, because that too should boost testosterone levels .