Where you can sunbathe nude or topless around the world

For true aficionados of nude relaxation, there are no parts of the body “where the sun don’t shine.”

And with appropriate protection — a liberal layer of sun screen, face masks where required — there are plenty of places around the world where it’s safe and legal to shed the burden of clothing and offer your skin up to some delicious warming rays.

UK swimwear brand Pour Moi has created a new map revealing the 39 countries that permit topless and nude sunbathing and the 38 countries where it’s too risky.

The team spent weeks researching the individual laws of countries and cross-referencing them with travel forums, blogs and social media posts.

The resulting map categorizes countries into four colors: green, red, amber and gray.

Europe is the continent that most embraces stripping off, with the green-lit lands of Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark and Germany being some of the many countries where you can easily find beaches that welcome birthday suits. Even in the buttoned-down UK, topless sunbathing is completely legal — if done discreetly.

Countries colored red are ones where public nudity of any kind is completely unacceptable or illegal. Think twice before throwing your scanties to the wind in Morocco, Grenada, Bahrain or Belarus.

You’d better throw some swimwear into your suitcase before traveling to any of the 29 amber countries, where laws might be ambiguous or there are very few locations where you can safely unleash your jiggly bits.

These places — such as Tunisia, where topless sunbathing is sometimes okay in private hotels but not generally acceptable on public beaches — will require you undertaking a bit more research before disrobing.

Countries colored gray are those where there wasn’t enough information for Pour Moi to make a categorization — so keep your assets tucked away there too.

Pour Moi has also created a dedicated map for the United States. Keep tops on in Tennessee, undies on in Indiana, ta-tas covered in Utah, and don’t let things fall south in South Carolina.

“Public nudity laws can become confused with the rules surrounding naked sunbathing, with many countries saying public nudity is illegal, but they are actually OK with topless sunbathing,” says Pour Moi. “For most nations, the ‘intention to offend’ is the main thing that differentiates trying to catch some vitamin D without tan lines, versus someone streaking or flashing.”

The swimwear specialists also dug into what the world has been Googling during those long months in lockdown. It reports that there were over 10.7 million searches made globally in the last 12 months for “nude beaches,” “nude resorts” and “sunbathe nude.”

As those are English terms, the results naturally skew towards English-speaking countries. The majority of those searches were made by the United States, Japan and Brazil, but when population size is accounted for, the nations most hungry for nude beach content are Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

Pour Moi reports that topless sunbathing is legal in green-lit Australia and that there are plenty of dedicated beaches where full nudity is allowed. New Zealand is an amber country with “preferred designated areas for naked sunbathing.” Red-categorized Ireland, meanwhile, is a country where a cozy sweater and a nice hooded anorak is the year-round beachwear of choice — although it did get its first official nude beach at Dublin’s Hawk Cliff in 2018.

For a country-by-country breakdown of rules on topless and nude sunbathing — and a closer look at those maps — check out the blogpost on Pour Moi’s site.