Warning: That Tan Could Be Hazardous
Indoor Tanning Poses Cancer Risks, Teenagers Learn
TEQUESTA, Fla. — On their way home from an SAT tutoring session, the Van Dresser twins, Alexandra and Samantha, 17, popped into Tan Fever & Spa, a small family-owned salon tucked into a strip mall between a bar and a supermarket.
They wanted to get tan before the prom, and the salon was the perfect combination of fast and cheap: Twenty minutes in a tanning bed cost just $7.
“It’s the quickness of the tanning bed,” Alexandra explained one afternoon last year. “We don’t have time to lay out on a beach.”
Indoor tanning might seem like a fashion that faded with the 1980s, but it remains a persistent part of American adolescence, popular spring, summer and fall but especially in winter, when bodies are palest. Salons with names like Eternal Summer and Tan City dot strip malls across the country, promising prettiness and, in some cases, better health, despite a growing body of evidence that links indoor tanning to skin cancer.
