The perfect year-round golden glow is something almost every young woman seems to strive for these days.
Both younger and older women are spending countless hours laying in the sun and under the lamp of a tanning bed at all times of the year to achieve that coveted exotic tan.
I tend to be a very rational person. I try to keep an open mind and be as accepting as I can of everyone’s opinions and viewpoints but I must admit, this tanning phenomenon is something I simply cannot understand.
The risks are so real and severe yet young women all over the country are choosing to turn away from the dangers and right into the parking lot of a tanning salon on a monthly or even weekly basis.
As young people, we tend to live for the here and now, which is a wonderful and exciting way to be and makes your teens and twenties the most thrilling years of your life.
However, the major downside to this type of mindset is that we tend to adopt a “that won’t happen to me” attitude, we think we’re invincible.
And at this point, we cannot even use ignorance as an excuse. “Well I didn’t know it was bad for me” is nowhere near justification for constant tanning in my eyes because the truth is that we know exactly how bad it is.
There is no question regarding the correlation between consistent tanning and a sharply increased risk for skin cancer.
According to skincancer.org, Indoor ultraviolet (UV) tanners are 74 percent more likely to develop melanoma than those who have never tanned indoors.
Those who tan indoors just four times a year increase their risk of developing melanoma by 11%. Likewise, rates of this potentially deadly skin cancer have grown by 800% among young women (age 18 to 39).
Tanning indoors only four times a year increases your risk by 11%! Those statistics are terrifying to me.
Last year, doctors found melanoma on my sister, a woman in her thirties with two young children, as a result of sun damage sustained through outdoor tanning in her teens and twenties…but it won’t happen to you, right?
I cannot comprehend how, any young woman with even an ounce of self-respect and concern for her own health and well-being could lay comfortably in a tanning bed knowing what we know about this risk.
Likewise, no matter what you may hear at tanning salons, the cumulative damage caused by UV radiation actually leads to premature skin aging (wrinkles, lax skin, brown spots, and more).
So while we think we are living in the here and now all we are doing is increasing our beauty, our skin has an incredibly strong memory and those hours spent in the tanning bed in our twenties make us more susceptible to premature aging and skin damage later in life.
Not as alarming as the health concerns but very important nonetheless is what this tanning phenomenon says about what our society values and our self-esteem and standards as women.
Men and women alike associate tan skin with being attractive, so we do whatever we can (regardless of the danger it puts us in) to achieve that ideal.
Why are we so afraid to have the skin color we naturally have and look the way we naturally look?
I cannot count the number of times I have heard one of my female friends or peers say (in the middle of winter) with a look of disgust on their face “I’m so pale!” and my immediate reaction is always “yeah….its December”.
I know we hear this from everywhere yet we still refuse to believe it…beauty should not have one specific definition and by no means should we be compromising our health to fit that definition.
We come in all different shapes, sizes and colors that in itself is beautiful. Do not sacrifice that unique beauty (or your health) for anything.
The tan will fade but the damage is permanent.
Bridget Goedeke
Viewpoints Editor