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Do you have fair skin? Is your hair color blonde, red, or light brown? Do you have blue, green or gray eyes? Before you tan, do you usually burn? Do you burn easily? What about if you don’t “tan” but you are outdoors a lot (Comforth)? These questions can be answered “yes” by many Americans and are directly taken from a checklist used for people wondering if they are likely to develop skin cancer. It has been found that even if your answer isn’t “yes” to every question, you are most likely able to answer “yes” to at least one (Comforth). It used to be that in order to get a tan; you had to spend countless hours outside baking in the sun probably covered with baby oil. People were only tan during the spring and summer when it was warm enough to lay exposed to the sun for hours on end. In those days of baby oil and summer tans, people weren’t as aware of the damages of their everyday activities on their skin. Today, however, people are overly exposed to the dangers of ultraviolet (or should I say ultraviolent) radiation from sun. The results are inevitable; a mole, lesions, early aging, wrinkles, and skin cancer. Despite this wealth of knowledge, people are now tanning more than ever. Golden to baked skin is “attractive” and Americans are going to great links to achieve such beauty.
Now there are many options available to achieve the “golden, healthy” tan. There are spray on tans, mystic tans, air-brushed tans, a “tan-pill” (take twice a day!) and the ever so popular; tanning bed. Why are Americans so intent on discoloring their skin? In a study from the Skin Cancer foundation, it was found that nearly 30 million people tan indoors in tanning beds per year. Of these 30 million, 2.3 million of them are teens.

Indoor tanning is a 2 billion dollar per year industry in the United States. There are estimated to be around 25,000 tanning salons in this country contributing to the increasing numbers of skin cancer diagnoses (Skin...