“This year it’s for prom. My dress is peach and I can’t look white with a peach dress,” senior Anna Brown said. “I have to look tan.”
Brown is one of many Northwood students who tan in beds and in the sun. She says she has been tanning in beds five days a week since the beginning of March.
Although Brown admits that she considers the threat of skin cancer, it’s not to the point of preventing her from going to beds.
“[It’s] not enough to make me stop tanning because I tan outside anyway,” Brown said.
UNC Dermatologist Dr. Craig Burkhart says that indoor tanning beds that use solely UVA rays have 15 times the strength of UVA radiation as sunlight does. In comparison, one hour in the tanning bed would be 15 hours in the sun in the middle of July.
But Brown doesn’t only tan in beds. Actually, she starts the summer tanning in beds and then spends the rest of the hot months tanning outside. She says it helps her get a darker tan.
“I get a better tan outside, but I guess [the] tanning bed for me is a pre-tan for summer,” Brown said.
CTE teacher Kim Hall also tans in a tanning bed from April to May before she starts tanning outside over the summer.
“If I tan in a tanning bed first and get a base tan, then I won’t burn when I go out in the sun,” Hall said.
Burkhart doesn’t believe in this theory.
“[Studies show that] people who do this ‘base tan’ thing actually tend to get more sunburn than the [people] who didn’t get the base tan,” Burkhart said. “It’s probably because they have this false sense that they are protected when they are really not. It provides you with an SPF of maybe two, so what you’re really doing is providing an extra couple of days of damage to your skin. It’s not anywhere near as protective as people say.”
Testing coordinator Nancy Brown says she enjoys tanning in beds because of the way she feels afterwards.
“The reason why I do it is because I love the way it makes me feel. I just feel better soaking in some Vitamin D,” Brown said.
But Burkhart says there is no real way to receive Vitamin D from a tanning bed.
“Vitamin D comes from UVB [rays], not from UVA, [which are in tanning beds], so you don’t get therapeutic levels from a tanning bed,” Burkhart said. “That’s bogus.”
Although some students say they only tan 10 or 15 minutes every time they go to the beds, according to Burkhart, the first exposure, especially while they are still young, is the worst for the students.
“One exposure to an indoor tanning bed in young life will increase your risk by 75 percent for melanoma. And then it just goes up from there,” Burkhart said. “Moderate exposure seems to be what most kids are getting that causes their melanoma.”
Working in a dermatology clinic, Burkhart sees firsthand what the effects of indoor and outdoor tanning have on young people. At the UNC clinic, Burkhart says that they see about 50 patients a week for melanomas, a form of skin cancer. About 30 percent of those patients are young women ages 25-35.
“If you ever get exposed to radiation, it takes 10 years to develop cancer,” Burkhart said. “So most girls get their exposure [as teenagers], and then they develop their melanoma [in their 20’s]. The most common cancer, for 25-29 year old girls, is melanoma.”
According to skincancer.org, melanomas are the second most common form of cancer for young people 15-29 years of age.
Burkhart said that the clinic has seen a melanoma patient as young as 17.
As of now, the only way to treat these melanomas is to cut them out of the skin.
“It depends on your depth,” Burkhart said. “If you have a melanoma that’s really thin, you just cut it out, but it leaves a big scar. If it gets any deeper than one millimeter into your skin, then it’s likely to spread throughout the rest of your body and then it’s just kind of finding the tumor, cutting it out of your body and crossing your fingers with the help of chemotherapy.”
According to skincancer.org, once the melanoma penetrates the skin, the survival rate drops to 15 percent.
Because of his daily exposure to young people with melanomas, Burkhart is an advocate for a bill to ban indoor, radiation-based tanning for people under 18.
“Eighteen is the age tanning should be banned because it has the highest risk of getting melanoma,” Burkhart said. “Kids are being lied to. Maybe as high as 95 percent [of tanning salons] would lie to you about the risks when you go into those tanning parlors. So we really need to protect [young people].”
Although the decision on whether or not the bill is passed will not be known for another couple of years, Burkhart goes to Raleigh almost every week to educate legislators about the risks of indoor tanning.
“One thing to realize about indoor tanning beds: [they use] UVA [rays], and that is the one ray that causes all of the things we don’t like,” Burkhart said. “The brown spots, the blood vessels coming to the surface of your skin, the skin thinning and wrinkles.
“Every time you get tan, that’s the sign that your skin is damaged, that’s the sign that DNA was damaged, so there is no safe way to tan.”
— By Madison Roberts & Caroline Schneider