Spray Tan Robot: From Sunbeds to ABB Robot Arms

A spray tan robot is the latest machine in a long line built to put colour on skin without the sun. On 12 October 2026 WMUR reported that a spa in Nashua, New Hampshire, now offers robotic massage and an automated spray tan. This post follows the story from the sunbed to the booth to a robot arm that moves a spray head around a body. It also asks where ABB robots could fit, since spraying an even coat is a job industrial robots have done for decades on car bodies and other parts.

A tanning salon front in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2025. Photo: Harrison Keely / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

From beach tans to sunbeds and tanning lotion

Tanned skin was not always fashionable. Wikipedia's history of indoor tanning credits Coco Chanel's return from Cannes with a tan in 1923 as the moment a tan became a fashion accessory. Home sunlamps followed in the 1920s, and they gave off a large share of UVB, which often burned. Decades earlier, the Danish physician Niels Ryberg Finsen had built a carbon arc lamp in 1890 to treat skin disease with light, work that won him the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Tanning moved from medicine to fashion within a generation.

Coco Chanel with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich in the 1920s, the decade tanning became fashionable. Photo: Unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The modern sunbed arrived in 1975, when the German scientist Friedrich Wolff built a bed that emitted about 95 percent UVA and 5 percent UVB, which reduced burning. A tanning salon opened in Berlin in 1977, and Wolff's equipment went on sale in the United States in 1978. Salons spread across Europe and North America through the late 1970s. The customer lay still while lamps did the work, so a robot had nothing to do there. The labour went into running the shop.

A modern tanning bed with its lamps lit, the kind of machine that grew from Friedrich Wolff's 1975 design. Photo: Ktkvtsh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sunless tanning took a separate path. In the 1950s Eva Wittgenstein found at Cincinnati Children's Hospital that DHA, used in an oral treatment, stained skin brown. Man-Tan launched in 1959 and Coppertone's QT, short for Quick Tan, followed in 1960. Early lotions left an orange cast and streaks. Automated spray booths appeared from the late 1990s and changed the job: instead of rubbing lotion on by hand, a client stood in a booth while nozzles coated the body. That booth was the first real automation of the tan itself.

A 1960s advert for Coppertone's QT, an early sunless tanning lotion. Photo: 1950sUnlimited / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Booths, airbrush artists and a spa in Nashua

A sunless tan in a salon today comes in two main ways. An operator sprays by hand with an airbrush or an HVLP gun, which takes skill because uneven passes leave streaks. Or the client steps into a booth with fixed nozzles. A newer idea puts the nozzles on a robotic arm that traverses the booth, and patent filings describe it, with a foot rinser so the feet do not darken too much and a wash-down between clients. I could not find a named maker with a verified launch, so the patents are evidence of the concept only.

An indoor tanning shop in a covered shopping street in Utsunomiya, Japan. Photo: Tyuvc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The WMUR headline from Nashua pairs the spray tan with robotic massage. Massage robot makers such as Aescape use two arms with padded tools and software that adapts to the body, and a spa that already lets a machine touch clients has less to overcome when it adds one that sprays them. Our post on ABB robots and massage covers that side. I have only the headline for the Nashua story, so I will not guess which products the spa uses or how the tan machine works.

Two robot arms beside a massage table, Aescape's robot massage system, in 2026. Photo: BrokenSegue / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where do ABB robots come in? I found no source showing ABB in a spray tan booth, so this is a possibility and not a project. ABB does have a long record in spraying. The IRB 5500 is a paint robot built to work in air where solvent vapour can ignite, and ABB paint robots coat car bodies in booths worldwide, as described in our post on ABB paint robots. The skills carry over: constant distance, constant speed, a known path and a repeatable overlap between passes. A person is far less forgiving than a car door, though.

ABB paint robots working on a car body inside a paint booth. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robotic spray tanning

A robot that sprays a person needs to know where the person is. Early designs would rely on a booth and a fixed stance. A better one could use depth cameras to outline the body and plan the spray path around it, though I found no maker describing that yet. A collaborative arm such as the ABB GoFa CRB 15000 is built to work next to people and stop on contact, which is the safety behaviour any body-facing machine needs. A cell like this would normally be built and tested first in simulation, so reach and speed are known before a client steps in.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Safety is the hard part. A spray tan is a mist of DHA solution, so a booth needs extraction, eye and mouth protection and clear consent. Hygiene is an advantage: a robot that touches only air is easier to clean than a person-to-person service. The rules around tanning also change quickly, as Australia's 2015 ban on commercial sunbeds shows. Sunless tanning is often promoted as the safer option, but a robot raises its own questions about who is responsible if a nozzle misfires or the client moves mid-spray.

Protective goggles for indoor tanning, the eye protection a body-facing booth still needs. Photo: SarahSV / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Cost and skill remain open. A salon with a few staff can already spray by hand, and a robot arm with sensors and a washable booth costs far more than an airbrush kit. The case looks strongest where volume is high and consistency matters, such as large spas, gyms and events. A home robot seems unlikely for years, though a smaller handheld or wall-mounted device could arrive first. Spraying itself is solved. What is missing is safe contact with a person. More applications are listed in our ABB robot use cases.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, launched in 2025, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

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