Your eyes shut, then the next moment you are envisioning yourself on the beach, sun shining, and waves crashing. Fifteen minutes later, stepping out, your feeling great. Looking down, you’re finally looking healthy. That little bit of color is all you need for your confidence to go through the roof, and for all your friends to compliment you saying, “Wow, you’re so tan”. You’ve never felt better, but that doesn’t’ mean you are.
The little voice in the back of your mind says, “this is dangerous”, and you keep silencing it. But it needs to speak out. Because here is the truth: tanning beds are dangerous.
Being on campus, the talk often resorts to how we’re looking or how we’re feeling. It’s not uncommon to hear things like “Wow, you look so tan” or “I’m jealous of how tan you are”. Our fellow collegiates only inspire us to keep stepping back into the tanning bed and think nothing of it.
The way to stop the need to tan starts with the reasoning to why we do it. It’s not for the frat boys, they can barely see your skin in the dark, dance parties. But then who is it for? An overall census of Michigan State girls say, they do it for themselves, they want confidence and they believe being tan will help them achieve this. Others mention the winter blues or SAD, saying it helps them feel better. Sometimes it is even the effects of peers and society. Having first hand seen this, when all the girls on your floor are rocking a healthy tan glow in the dead of winter, it can be tempting to join in yourself.
But you have to start thinking. Skin cancer might not seem real now, but in actuality it is. Melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer) can happen to any of your fellow collegiates. According to NCI, women that use tanning beds more than once a month are 55 percent more likely to develop melanoma. Even though we are still young, we’re not immune. More than 68,00 people in America will learn they have melanoma. Also about one in eight will die from melanoma. We need to start realizing how real it actually is.
Being tan isn’t bad, at Her Campus, we love it too, but it’s better to approach in another way. Make the trip to Sephora and splurge on that bronzer you’ve wanted. If you can’t avoid the need to be tan head to a drugstore and pick up at bottle of tanning lotion. Here you get to avoid the cancerous aspect of tanning with all the beauty bonuses of actually being tan.
Any color is a beautiful color. Love your skin as it is, feel confident and you will realize being tan does not affect your life. You affect how you feel in your skin. Feeling comfortable in your skin, literally, is a step on the way to being healthy.