It's a lovely day, by Glasgow standards, which is to say that it hasn't rained for several hours and shows no immediate sign of recommencing. This may be one reason why business is slow at the Consol Suncenter, a tanning salon so oddly situated that it might have fallen from the sky, landing in a layby between a drive-through McDonald's and an Esso petrol station, out on the city's car-clogged fringe. Fortunately, however, the absence of customers doesn't mean the owners have to pay for an attendant to sit around doing nothing. All the company's 13 Glasgow outlets are self-service and completely unstaffed: put a minimum of £1.50 into a slot near the entrance and one of the locked, numbered doors buzzes open. The sunbed inside powers up and the customer climbs in, pulling the upper portion shut like a vampire returning to a coffin.
Slow business is not generally a problem for Consol, a fast-growing Danish company that operates 69 outlets in the UK and 350 in other sun-starved parts of northern Europe, including Norway, Poland and the Faro Islands. In any case, there is a specific reason for the eerie quiet at this branch, in the Springburn district. Just up the road is Thomas Muir High School - from which, until recently, so many pupils were sneaking out for tanning sessions in their lunchbreaks that the school authorities started running lessons on how to apply a fake tan instead.
"We started noticing that students were coming in looking like they'd spent their lunch at the beach," says Alice Coyle, a social education teacher. "Well, I know it's almost never that sunny round here. And you were getting some very strange colours."
By the start of this year, the cost of a few minutes on a sunbed, which had been falling across Glasgow, reached today's rate of £1.50 for three minutes - a price bracket where it became a viable alternative use for lunch money. "£1.50 for three minutes. A bargain," says Coyle, with a wry lift of the eyebrows. "But it's not a bargain for a melanoma, is it?"
Coyle's campaign may be enjoying localised success, but it is hardly threatening the city's status as the sunbed capital of Britain. Sunbed salons and fake tanning sales alike have exploded across the UK in the past few years as the British - young women especially - resolve no longer to tolerate their trademark pastiness. And the extraordinary surge in popularity is evident nowhere so much as in Glasgow: though concentrated in poorer areas, salons crowd every neighbourhood, rubbing shoulders with organic delis in middle-class Shawlands, as well as with betting shops in Shettleston. The exact number is difficult to determine - the industry is completely unregulated, and outlets tend to open and close rapidly - but there are at least 72 in the city centre, while telephone directories list almost 220 in the wider area. Which means that Glasgow has almost as many salons as London, and significantly more per head than anywhere else in the UK. Between 2002 and 2003, the number of tanning premises in Glasgow doubled; the business is estimated to be worth £25m per year in Scotland.
"It's been amazing, really," says Leanne Mackie, the startlingly bronzed manager of one of the two branches of the Sunset Beach salon on a single block of Duke Street, in Glasgow's east end. (There are also two branches of Sunset Beach on Argyle Street, and two more on Springburn Way.) "I think it might be the weather. You expect Scottish people to be pasty and white, don't you?" Money is pouring into outlets such as Sunset Beach - not just for sunbed hire, but for the whole subsidiary industry that has grown up in creams and lotions and oils for enhancing a sunbed tan, or for emulating it artificially. The bottles in the cabinet beside Mackie have names such as Love Monkey and Golden Tingling Blaze, Cheeky Brown and Almost Famous, Bronzing Fire Glaze, Scientific Velocity, Bearly Legal, Thrust, Intimidation, and Blazin' With Tingle Bronzing Hemp.
The salons do their best to present all this as a healthy development. Even at the unstaffed Consol Suncenter, there's a computerised information system promoting the benefits of sunbathing. "The sun gives us the essential vitamin D3, which prevents osteoporosis," a honeyed transatlantic voice explains. "On sunny days, we can manage almost anything."
Unsurprisingly, the medical establishment sees a slightly different picture. Glasgow has suffered enough from public health stereotyping in recent years (you won't actually find deep-fried Mars bars on the menu of the average chip shop, contrary to southern legend). But it suffers more acutely from real public-health problems, and one of them is this: more people, as a proportion of the population, are diagnosed with skin cancer each week in Scotland than in Australia.
Celebrity endorsement
Tanning, according to a widely recounted anecdote, began in 1923, at the moment that Coco Chanel stepped off the Duke of Wellington's yacht at Cannes and into the gaze of the waiting cameras. The designer, the story goes, had spent too long in the sun by accident - but thanks to her status as an arbiter of style, her skin tone was interpreted as a fashion statement. For centuries until then, a pale skin had been the preserve of the moneyed classes; browner shades spoke of outdoor manual labour. It took the development of mass foreign tourism (and, possibly, Chanel's endorsement) before a tanned skin in Britain came to stand for something different: the leisure and wealth to take holidays in sunnier climates. One survey, conducted in 2000, found that almost 50% of Britons holidaying abroad considered coming home with a tan the most important reason for going in the first place.
The tanning boom of the past few years is a more complex thing: above all, we know now about the health risks of exposure to ultraviolet light, which contributed to a 24% increase in melanomas in Britain between 1995 and 2000. The popularity of tanning today is thus as much about fake tans as real ones - and the weakening of the taboo, among a certain kind of celebrity, against admitting that your tan is artificial. Victoria Beckham has had a spray-tanning booth installed in her home as a marketing strategy by the St Tropez brand; the singer Charlotte Church recently confided on Davina McCall's chat show that her boyfriend, the rugby player Gavin Henson - prone to appearing at public events sporting literally orange skin - uses similar products. Lynsey McVean, a 16-year-old pupil at Thomas Muir who gave up using sunbeds when the school started teaching how to fake the effect, reels off a list of artificially tanned influences: "Victoria Beckham. Footballers' Wives. David Beckham."
"A few years ago you couldn't open a celebrity magazine without seeing a fake tan disaster - orange hands, or tide marks around the chin," says Catherine Woods, who writes about show business for the magazine Closer. "And strangely, that may eventually have made it easier for people to admit they do use it. After that, you couldn't move for people wearing fake tan on the red carpet - Hollywood stars, such as Catherine Zeta Jones. Now it's filtered down, and Jordan and Peter Andre say they're addicted to St Tropez. So it seems the big stars are going for a more pale and interesting look, and there's a certain snobbishness among the A-list about fake tans now.
"But certainly a celebrity talking about their beauty regime in a magazine wouldn't hide, any more, the fact of a fake tan. I think celebrities are less willing to admit to sunbed use now, in fact. That's actually more of a taboo."
The promoters of fake tanning - including Fake Bake, the firm called in to help at Thomas Muir High School - insist that they offer a healthier alternative to sunbeds. "People get sort of addicted to tanning," says Maureen, the manager of Suddenly Suntanned, a Glasgow salon where customers can receive an evenly applied spray tan in a shower-like booth, in a process reminiscent of nothing so much as a car wash. "They come in here to try to get off the sunbeds." (It was probably the American writer David Sedaris who first characterised this kind of psychological addiction to tanning as "tanorexia", a term he applied to his sister. "Year after year, she arrived at the beach with a base coat that the rest of us could only dream of achieving as our final product," he wrote in the memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day.)
The problem is that fake tanning, for all its cheap associations, is actually much more costly than a few minutes on a sunbed. A professionally administered spray tan starts at around £25; a 6oz tube of self-tanning cream can cost £20. The rise of fake tans among celebrities thus feeds the fashion for browner skin in general, but not only among those who can afford to go fake.
"Spray tanning is still expensive by comparison," says Karen Richens, business manager of the upmarket NRG Connection gym and salon near the city centre, where customers' minutes spent under the bulbs in the walk-in tan stand are carefully logged in a card-index file. "There are a lot of people in Glasgow living pretty much hand to mouth, and if they have a few pounds to spare, they're going to use it on the sunbed."
Criminal outlets
Because the sunbed industry is an unregulated free-for-all, there is nothing that can be done, at least on a national level, to stop unscrupulous operators providing too much sunbed time to people who are too young. Even at the Consol Suncenter, which displays prominent notices banning children, it's hard to see how a minimum age could be reliably enforced.
Skin is markedly more susceptible to damage below the age of 16, "but if a salon allows an under-16-year-old in, they're not doing something illegal," says Kathy Banks, secretary of the Sunbed Association, a voluntary regulatory body to which about a quarter of salons belong. "It does go against health and safety recommendations, the government guidance. But that's not enforceable." Environmental health inspections - which are all that many local authorities have at their disposal when it comes to keeping an eye on the salons - have also uncovered cases of customers being burned by malfunctioning sunbeds, or sprayed with glass from bulbs.
Wily local councillors in some parts of the country have found ways to get a handle on the situation. In Edinburgh, for example, the Civic Government (Scotland) Act has been pressed into service, to require salons to hold public entertainment licences. When a licence is issued, it comes with a string of conditions attached; there are, as a result of this scheme, only around 30 tanning salons in Edinburgh. "We certainly wouldn't oppose national regulation of the industry," says Banks. "But all the indications we've ever seen are that government isn't really interested in pursuing the matter."
In Glasgow, specifically, another factor may be at play. According to local rumour - not exactly discouraged by the operators of upscale salons - a significant number of the more disreputable outlets may exist as money-laundering fronts for the city's criminals. The Daily Record newspaper has suggested that Tam "The Licensee" McGraw, a familiar figure of the Glasgow underworld, is among the figures who have moved into the sunbed industry. "If there was enough genuine business to sustain this amount of salons, the whole of Glasgow would be burned to a crisp," Ian Davidson, the MP for Glasgow Pollok, has said. A Strathclyde Police spokesman told the Guardian he knew of no specific cases of money-laundering linked to salons. "But they are the kind of premises that could be conducive to that, so it's definitely something we keep an eye on," he said.
Tanning cubicles may also be used as drugs distribution points, if an unnamed "underworld insider" quoted in the Record is to be believed. "The deal is, there will be one locked cubicle, and that's where the drugs are stashed," the source was quoted as saying. "The customer has a key, and goes into the cubicle, like they are going for a 12-minute tanning session. They come out afterwards with ounces of coke stashed on a belt."
Of course, if salons are being used for criminal purposes, that is only possible because they have become such a ubiquitous and unquestioned presence on our streets - the beneficiaries of a mania for tanning in which people too young to be using sunbeds are caught up. When it comes to attacking that problem, Coyle, at Thomas Muir, has found that the most persuasive argument has been not the longer-term risk of skin cancer, but the more immediate risk of older-looking skin. "I've got a friend who's 18 who gets mistaken for being in her early 30s," says Suzanne Lewis, another 16-year-old there. "That scares me. You try to tell her she doesn't need it but she keeps going back. You always have to keep going back for a little top-up."
The need to keep returning for a little more artificial sun is surely felt most strongly by those without the money for travel or other expensive enjoyments, and particularly by those in the more meteorologically blighted parts of the UK. But it's not exactly hard for anyone raised in Britain to understand - and even easier if, like Richens at the NRG Connection salon and gym, you also happen to have spent a few years living in a warmer country, in her case Australia.
"I know it's not raining today," she says, peering out of the window sceptically. "But in my experience, it is usually raining".
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