Being Pale: Fate Worse Than Death

I am standing here in Phoenix at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and the temperature is hovering right around the melting point of copper.

I know this because the pennies in my pocket are beginning to fuse. The heat waves are shimmering up from the sidewalk and it is difficult to breathe.

But as I raise my hand to block the relentless sun, I see a sign through my fingers: It is for a tanning salon.

I begin to laugh. A tanning salon? In Phoenix? Where the sun shines 300 days a year--and when I say shines, I mean char-broils?

When I get back to my hotel room I look in the Yellow Pages. I find 20 tanning salons in the greater Phoenix area (cutest name: “Brown Bunns” on Shea Boulevard). This is very unfortunate but completely understandable. I have written about this phenomenon before: It is a uniquely American right. The right to be goofy.

“Buckle my seat belt? No way. It’s my head and I got a right to have it go through the windshield if I want.”

“Wear a helmet on a motorcycle? Not a chance! I got a right to become a vegetable.”

“Stop getting suntans? Hey, it’s my skin and I got a right to get cancer.”

And we do. There are 500,000 new cases of skin cancer each year in the United States. One thing that causes skin cancer is tanning. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer. It is also one of the most curable forms. Even the worst type, malignant melanoma, is curable if you catch it in time.

But 23% of the people who develop it die because it has spread too far for effective treatment.

Melanoma skin cancer will strike 27,600 Americans this year and kill 5,300 of them. The number of cases of malignant melanoma is doubling each decade.

I know all these facts. And I mull them over as I head out to the pool for a tan. This makes no sense. This is my right to be goofy.

But at least I know why I am being goofy. I know why people get tans. It makes them look good. And they get compliments and this makes them feel good.

I look beautiful this week. More beautiful than usual, that is. I have a golden tan. I shouldn’t, but I do. I try to be sensible: I always use a sunscreen. I never stay out more than an hour a day. I try to avoid the most dangerous hours, around noon.

But I know I would be better off looking pale like the belly of a fish. I can’t seem to resist a tan, however.

The people who run tanning salons know this. They know about customers they call “tanorexics.” These are people with dark tans who keep coming back to get even tanner.

There are now 20,000 tanning parlors in the United States, up from 5,000 in 1986. Every day more than 1 million Americans use them, and annual retail sales are about at $1.2 billion.

This is more than goofy. This is nuts.

Contrary to some claims, there is no “safe” kind of suntanning. You can ask Kelly Salvey, a 21-year-old New Yorker. In 1989 she used a tanning machine in a health club for 60 minutes. She used it that long because after the first 40 minutes, she saw no results.

But within two hours of returning home, she had plenty of results: Her skin turned purple, she had trouble breathing, she dehydrated. She had received six times the recommended dosage of ultraviolet radiation and had second- and third-degree burns. She spent four days in a hospital and today she has permanent scars on her face.

All she wanted to do was look good.

Even in sunny cities where people get plenty tanned just walking around, tanning parlors flourish. People aren’t satisfied getting tanned in the daytime. They want to be able to get a tan at night, too.

You want to know how crazy this gets? This is one of the craziest stories I have read in years. It was carried by the Associated Press last week:

“A study of more than 1,000 people who had skin-cancer surgery found that nearly half continued to stay in the sun in the belief that cancer ‘was not enough of a problem to give up a tan.’

“The study, published in the April issue of the American Medical Assn.’s Archives of Dermatology, found that 44% had not changed their outdoor activities one year after removal of their cancers, despite repeated warnings by their doctors.” In addition, 38% still weren’t using sunscreens.

Now think about this. You get cancer. You have it removed by a doctor. And then you go back out to get a suntan. Why?

“The attitude of these non-compliant individuals, who were usually women, was that skin cancer was not enough of a problem to give up a tan,” said the study’s author, Dr. June K. Robinson, a dermatologist at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. A tan made these people “feel good.”

Which is just plain goofy. And if we wanted to help each other out, we would never compliment a friend’s tan.

Instead we would say: “You look like cooked meat, you jerk! Don’t you know enough to come in out of the sun?”

I have been telling this to myself every time I look in the mirror this week.

I just wish I didn’t look so darned good.