The Tanning Taboo

The Tanning Culture
To lots of people, summer means hanging out at the pool or the beach, soaking up rays. For years, teens have spent hours baking in the sun in pursuit of the perfect golden tan. Most Americans, including up to 80% of people under age 25, think they look better when they have a tan. But our infatuation with tanning only came about in the 20th century.

In the 19th century and earlier, being as pale as possible was desirable in certain countries, particularly the United States and some European nations. If you were tan, it meant you spent time outside doing manual labor, like farming. Only the wealthy could afford to have other people do that work for them. So the paler you were, the richer you seemed. Members of the 18th-century French royal court took the look one step further, powdering their faces stark white to look as light as possible.

All that changed in the 1920s, when the designer Coco Chanel returned from a vacation to the French Riviera with a deep tan and started a new fashion craze. Suddenly, tans were the badges of the rich.

How Tanning Affects Your Skin
You may not think of your skin as much more than a wrapping for your body, but it is your largest organ and the main barrier between your body and the environment. It also contains cells that help your immune system fight off infections.

The sun's rays contain two types of ultraviolet radiation that reach your skin: UVA and UVB. (A third type, UVC, is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere before it reaches you.)

UVB radiation burns the upper layers of skin (the epidermis), causing sunburns, whereas UVA radiation, which penetrates to the lower layers (the dermis), causes tanning. UVA rays are considered the culprit in the aging of skin, and UVB rays are more often linked to skin cancer. However, research suggests that UVA radiation may also play a role in skin cancer.

A tan is visible proof that your skin is being damaged. When ultraviolet radiation hits your skin, it stimulates cells known as melanocytes, which make a brown pigment called melanin. The melanocytes respond to the sun by making even more melanin to protect your skin from the sun. The melanin acts sort of like an umbrella for the skin's cells and can give people the brown tint that is a suntan.

Different people have different amounts of melanin in their skin. Those with a Northern European background tend to have less melanin and be rather pale, whereas people with dark brown or black skin, like many people from Africa , have more.

Based on these differences, dermatologists have come up with six skin types, ranging from a Type I (fair skin, blonde or red hair, and always burns in the sun) to a Type VI (black skin and usually doesn't get sunburned). People who are a Type V or VI have more natural protection against the sun than those who are a Type I or II, but that doesn't mean they should ignore warnings about sun exposure.

Long-Term Effects of the Sun
Melanin can only protect your skin so much. If you continue to be exposed to the sun, the UV radiation can eventually damage your skin. That damage shows up as:

To get a good idea of the effects of sunlight, look at your parents' skin and see how different it is from yours. Much of that difference is due to sun exposure and only a small part is due to the fact that your folks are actually older than you are. In the worst-case scenario, too much sun can cause skin cancer, lead to problems with your eyes, or weaken your immune system, making it harder for you to fight off diseases.

Skin cancer is epidemic in the United States . Although the numbers of new cases of many other types of cancer are falling or leveling off, melanoma, the most serious (and most frequently fatal) type of skin cancer, is the fastest-growing type of tumor in the United States in terms of new cases. In fact, dermatologists are seeing patients in their twenties with skin cancer these days - in the past, skin cancer mostly affected people in their fifties or older.

Most skin cancers will be one of the two less serious types - basal cell or squamous cell carcinoma - which have high cure rates, but even these can be very damaging and potentially deadly.

Protecting Yourself
Of course, if you never went out in the sun, you wouldn't have to worry about any of this. But who wants to live like a hermit?

The best way to care for your skin is to find a balance between activity and protection. Sunscreens, which act as a block to the sun's harmful rays, can be one of your best defenses against sun damage because they protect you without interfering with your comfort and activity levels. (In other words, you don't have to wear only long clothes or hide indoors when the sun is shining!) The SPF number on a sunscreen is a way to indicate the level of protection. Sunscreens with a higher SPF number provide more defense against the sun's damaging UV rays.

Here are some tips to protect your skin and eyes from sun damage. Even if you don't follow all of these steps all of the time, following some of them can help protect you from sunburn and skin damage and reduce your risk of skin cancer.

Certain medications, such as antibiotics used to treat acne and birth control pills, can increase your sensitivity to the sun. Ask your doctor to find out whether your medications might have this effect and what you should do.

Tan Without the Trauma
Even when you're serious about protecting your skin, you may sometimes want the glow of a tan. Luckily, there are lots of products on the market that let you tan safely and sun-free. These do not include sun lamps or tanning beds, however.

Some people think that because sun lamps and tanning beds use only UVA light, which shouldn't leave you with a burn, they are a safe way to tan. (Despite manufacturer claims to the contrary, some tanning lamps do emit UVB light as well.) But the concentration of UVA light from a tanning bed is greater than that from the sun, so in the long run you absorb far more rays, significantly age your skin, and put yourself at even greater risk for skin cancer. (Doctors say that the use of tanning salons is one reason why they are treating more patients in their twenties for skin cancer.)

Other tanning devices to skip include tanning "accelerators" or tanning pills. These products claim to speed up the body's production of melanin or darken the skin, but there's no proof that they work and they have not been approved by government agencies for tanning purposes.

One way to go bronze is with sunless self-tanners, also known as "tans in a bottle." They contain an ingredient (DHA) that oxidizes on the outermost layers of your skin, giving you the look of a tan. You can apply sunless tanners just a few hours before a big event, and most sunless tans will last several days to a week.

You may have to try a few brands of self-tanners until you find one that looks best with your skin tone. These self-tanners come in sprays and lotions and are easy to use (follow the directions on the specific product box). They're cheap, too, usually around $10. Snag your parent or a friend to help you apply the stuff because the best results occur when it's applied evenly over the body.

If you have a few bucks to spend, many salons offer airbrush tanning applications, which may look more like a natural tan and are less likely to give your skin an orange tint than self-tanners. After your eyes, lips, and other mucous membranes are covered, a DHA solution is hooked up to a spray compressor, and the tan is sprayed on by a salon technician. A few hours after the application is applied, you'll be sporting your new, safe tan.

With both self-tanners and airbrush tanning, you'll get better results if you exfoliate your skin with a scrub brush or loofah before the tanner is applied - this process evens your skin tone and removes dead skin cells. And with both types of products, you'll still need to wear sunscreen when you go outdoors to protect you from the dangerous effects of the sun's rays. But the real deal is that you get the warm glow of a tan while you keep your skin beautiful for years to come.