When my pale-skinned, Anglo-Irish father was a kid, his parents would lovingly scoot him out of the house and into the blazing California sun with the order to “Go out and get a good, healthy sunburn!” As we bask in the enlightenment of the modern age, however, such a scenario might warrant a call to Child Protective Services.
Not so long ago, a feverish red hide was perceived as a sign of good health. But with scientific research of recent decades consistently linking UV-ray exposure to the development of deadly skin cancers, staying shielded from the rays seems like a no-brainer. Instead, shrewd retailers have brought this bad habit indoors with ubiquitous tanning bed franchises like Hollywood Tans, L.A. Tans, and Planet Beach. Americans with bronze ambitions flocked to the beds like moths to a flame, and the indoor tanning industry now brings in $5 billion annually.
Indoor tanning—like smoking, unprotected sex, and the occasional six-margarita evening—is one of those guilty behaviors that we all know probably isn’t super-duper good for us, but which many otherwise-intelligent women indulge in anyway. Not surprisingly, young women constitute the majority of tanning bed users. According to the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), every day more than one million Americans patronize tanning salons, and over seventy percent of customers are Caucasian women between sixteen and forty-nine.
Preventative Medicine
In response to the escalating number of young tanning bed users—and the correlated rise in skin cancers among this population—the AAD has launched an aggressive campaign to educate young women on this issue. Print ads, internet banners, and TV spots warn of the harm that tanning beds can cause to users’ health and appearance. The ads are direct and informative, albeit a little grating in that strained, teen-speak way: one poster quips that “tanning beds can B 2 risky 4 wrds.”
Spokesperson for the campaign is Miss Maryland 2006, Brittany Leitz, who knows the dangers of tanning all too well. She began tanning, (both at salons and outdoors), at the age of seventeen, and was diagnosed with stage II melanoma at twenty years old; she has since undergone twenty-seven surgeries to remove the tumor and other moles on her body, and has the scars to prove it. Melanoma is the second most common cancer in women between twenty and thirty-five, and the leading cause of cancer death in women ages twenty-five to thirty.
