Multivariate rapid variation describes decay rates of joint light tails of a multivariate distribution. We impose a local uniformity condition to control decay variation of distribution tails along different directions, and using higher-order tail dependence of copulas, we prove that a rapidly varying multivariate density implies rapid variation of the joint distribution tails. As a corollary, rapid variation of skew-elliptical distributions is established under the assumption that the underlying density generators belong to the max-domain of attraction of the Gumbel distribution.