tanning

On the coach to Liverpool, I was reading from the Guardian, my favourite British newspaper (Matt says that it caters for the knit-your-own tofu demographic!). There was an article about the profusion of tanning salons in Glasgow. In fact, all of Britain has fallen in love with tanning, the report says. Places with horrible weather have lots of tanning salons, like Glasgow. Secondary school students do a lot of tanning, they say, because short sessions are quite cheap--"a viable alternative use for lunch money." Aparently things have got to the stage that at one high school they started offering lessons on how to apply a fake tan!

Tans are cheap--but skin cancer at what cost? I have become a bit more vocal about safe sun recently. My mum had a cancerous mole removed a couple of years ago, so that makes me more at risk for skin cancer myself. I did some tanning in high school (to prepare for the prom, you know!). But it was so expensive that I didn't get much colour. It was a cosy way to spend a free period, though. Now I wear sunscreen every day and I am becoming a fake tan fan. I also just don't see the point in spending (a lot of) money to change my skin colour. With my pasty English husband I don't need much!

The article asks if there should be a minimum age for tanning, as there is for other dangerous habits like smoking and drinking. If they ever chose eighteen as the age, I would have been too young when I bought my sessions in high school. The reporter wonders if students know what they are doing when they go tanning and if they wiegh the consequences. I centainly didn't. In Britain there is no monitoring of the tanning industry, and that allows "tanorexia" among young people.