Tanning salons and your skin - Think Healthy

Shape, May, 2002 by Sharon Cohen

With summer just around the corner, you may be tempted to patronize your local tanning salon, especially if it advertises a "safe tan" with "no harmful rays." Though the ultraviolet-A light that tanning beds use doesn't tend to burn the way the sun does, a new study confirms what has long been suspected: It causes deeper cell damage linked to skin cancer.

A study of nearly 1,500 people ages 25-74 found that people who used a tanning lamp or sun bed, even decades earlier, were 2.5 times as likely to develop squamous cell carcinoma and 1.5 times as likely to have a basal cell carcinoma (the most common type) as those who had never used these devices. Whether or not people had smoked, undergone radiation treatments, or had a history of sun exposure, sunbathing and sunburns did not affect the results. Though there weren't enough people in this study with melanoma to establish a link between tanning devices and this potentially deadly form of skin cancer, other studies have shown such a connection. The study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.