Indoor tanning popular despite costs

Using artificial tanning to maintain a summertime glow year-round has become a cultural norm and sign of beauty for American adolescents and adults alike in the last several decades.

In recent years, however, concern has grown about the damage done on one’s skin along the way.

On May 21, North Carolina joined nine other states in banning tanning bed use by those under 18 years old.

Gov. Pat McCrory signed the Jim Fulghum Teen Skin Cancer Prevention Act on May 21, and it will take effect in October.

To Dr. Brad Merritt, director of Mohs and dermatologic surgery at UNC, the new law is an important step in fighting a harmful beauty standard.

After treating over 500 cases of melanoma in five years, Merritt said he sees many tanners that start as minors — using tanning beds before events like prom or prior to going to the beach.

The risk to that behavior is a big one, he said.

The use of tanning beds increases the risk of melanoma by 74 percent, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation.

In some of those cases, Merritt said he has seen patients who are addicted to the activity.

“I’ve had patients who have a tanning bed in their own home,” he said. “It’s a daily thing. They’re that addicted to it.”

UNC journalism professor Seth Noar has studied the motivation behind why college-age females use indoor tanning.

He said tanning bed use is a complex behavior fueled by multiple things.

Multiple young women in his study tanned for appearance-based reasons.

“Some women say, ‘It makes me look thinner,’ ‘it makes me look healthier,’ or ‘it makes me feel better about myself,’” he said.

Noar said he also found that mood enhancement is another reason people use tanning beds — that the activity relieves stress and is relaxing.

Dannielle Kelley, a third-year doctorate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said she used tanning beds in high school during harsh Wisconsin winters.

“We would all just go to the tanning bed because it was a way to get warm,” she said.

At the time, Kelley said she didn’t realize the physical harm and used tanning beds to look better in bright-colored clothes.

She said she attributes the desire to have bronzed skin to advertising and a general desire to have the “beach look.”

“When I moved to Wisconsin (from Long Beach, Calif.), everyone wanted to look like they were from California still,” she said.

Noar said the indoor tanning ban on minors might or might not affect the tanning behaviors of those minors when they arrive at college.

Of the young women in Noar’s studies, he said 90 percent started using tanning beds in high school. Whether taking the opportunity to start early will reduce the number who tan indoors in college is still not clear, he said.

Noar is now working to design messages that resonate with tanners and warn of the direct relations to skin cancer.

He said we are only at the beginning of shifting the culture around artificial tanning.

“We’re kind of where we were with tobacco 50 years ago,” he said.

“The light bulb is just starting to go off.”

state@dailytarheel.com