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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Ignoring health risks, appearance-obsessed American teens are pouring into tanning salons.
Jul 28, 2004 | During her freshman year of high school in suburban Sacramento, Calif., kids made fun of Christine Sorba for being too pale. "They'd throw pencils at me and say they'd go through me, because I was as white as a ghost," says Sorba, a fair-skinned brunette.
A school dance was coming up, and Sorba wanted to look good -- so she found a solution in an indoor tanning booth. She was immediately hooked. "Now I go about three times a week and I feel that I look better in my clothes," says Sorba, now 18. She even works at a tanning salon, Maui Tan in Sacramento, making it easy for her to use her favorite 160-watt stand-up tanning booth. "My legs look a lot better tan," she said. "I have a lot more confidence in myself."
Every year, according to a recent study published in the Archives of Dermatology, more than 2 million U.S. teenagers visit tanning salons. Partly thanks to the $5 billion industry's aggressive marketing tactics, teens' passion for artificial tanning has surged over the last decade: 30 to 40 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds use tanning booths repeatedly, according to a recent Case Western Reserve University study -- despite doctors' warnings about skin cancer and wrinkles and the media's growing emphasis on sunless tanning methods. And the National Tanning Training Institute reported that the number of people who go tanning (loyal tanners consider it a verb), grew from 27 million in 2000 to 29 million in 2003. One of the fastest-growing segments of the market is female teens 16 to 19.
"Our prevention efforts are clearly failing," says Dr. James M. Spencer, vice chairman of the department of dermatology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Pointing to a 2002 survey at Indiana University that found 92 percent of the young adult tanning-bed users were aware of the health risks, he said, "Kids know about the dangers. They know, and they don't care."
"Why should we care?" says Lauren Selicione, 21, of Boca Raton, Fla., who began tanning at 13. "Kids are going to do it because we want to have color. I think it will take kids seeing skin cancer for themselves to change. I don't believe anything until I experience it myself."
More young people are finding out firsthand the consequences of a killer tan. A 2002 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute reported that melanoma cases have increased by 60 percent among women ages 15 to 29 over the past three decades. And, the study found, tanning beds are partly to blame: People who regularly use tanning devices have 2.5 times the risk of squamous cell cancer and 1.5 times the risk of basal cell cancer, which are connected to cumulative U.V. exposure. Dermatologists are studying how teens' young, rapidly replicating cells may make them more vulnerable to skin cancer than those of a 35-year-old's, but the American Academy of Dermatology says one thing's certain: People receive about 80 percent of their lifetime sun exposure by the time they're 18.
