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Heat can come in the FORM of Ultraviolet rays, but it's not the heat that tans you -- it's the rays. They activate melanocytes in your epidermis which produce a few things, melanin and Vitamin D being the most notable. Melanin is what presents the "dark" color, not the skin itself. They've evolved their place there to prevent the mutation effect that all radiocative rays have on organic tissue. Without them, we could easily get cancer from even the slightest touch by the suns' rays. Albinos have little or none of it, and are a perfect example of this. If it were heat alone, why don't albinos at least gain a little pigment like those of us without melanin deficiency? Because it's the UV rays, not the heat.
As for the shower idea, it's perpetuated all over the place with a bit of psuedoscience to back it up. The claim is that the excess heat directly on the skin provokes a melanocyte response similar to the white blood cell response. When our body is in a "fever" state (overheated) we produce an excess of white blood cells and similar ancillary ones. It seems a bit logical to assume that melanin production would increase, but I've never seen a study that could link the heat of the epidermis with the production of melanin. It's an alright assumption, but science has yet to agree.
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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel
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