It's been dry and even a little sunny outside the Sunbooth Centre in north London for almost half an hour; inside, Angie, shivering at the miserable British summer, is looking forward to getting away next week. Though it will be her first foreign holiday in three years, Angie is already what is sometimes called a "lovely colour" – nut brown on her arms and chest, slightly paler on her face where she's wearing makeup. Of course she uses the beds as well as working here, she says. Everybody prefers to be brown.
Boasting "London's most powerful sunbooths" and the "best tan in town", this salon offers sessions of up to 12 minutes at a time, at a cost of £12. Angie wouldn't really recommend it for me, however, even though my skin is comparatively dark. "Twelve minutes would leave you a bit … crispy." Clients, though, won't always be told. "People want to keep doing it. We get young people coming in asking, how often can I do it?" They don't allow under 16s, however. Using a sunbed every day would certainly give me a colour, she says, before adding: "Every day is not ideal."
On that point, one can say with confidence, she is not alone. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation, this week reviewed its advice on sunbeds, categorising them in the highest-risk carcinogenic substances and habits. Where the use of sunbeds was until recently judged to be "probably carcinogenic to humans", there is no longer any ambiguity. Just like asbestos, arsenic and cigarettes, we can now say emphatically: sunbeds cause cancer.
They are doing so, what's more, in alarmingly increasing numbers in Britain. Rates of malignant melanoma in the UK have more than quadrupled in the last three decades, with 10,410 cases reported in Britain in 2006, the last year for which figures are available, an increase of almost 7% on the previous year. Cancer Research UK expects that figure to rise to 15,500 by 2024, making the cancer the fourth most common type among men and women. It is already the most common cancer among those aged 15 to 34. Campaigners are clear in attributing much of the blame directly to sunbed use.
And yet, whatever the dangers, the nation's enthusiasm for the sunny delights of ultraviolet strip bulbs remains undimmed. No one knows how many tanning salons there are in Britain – Kathy Banks of the Sunbed Association, an industry body which voluntarily regulates about 20% of sunbed providers, puts the figure at 6,000-7,000, but admits that is "just a guesstimate". The influential Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (Comare) estimates "8,000 and rising". A wander along any high street, however, reveals their prevalence, some advertising sessions for as little as 50p per minute, with deals and packages reducing costs further. A small proportion of salons do not have any staff; by placing coins in a slot, regardless of your age or skin type, you can toast at your convenience – and return for more when you're done.
Figures on usage are equally anecdotal and equally alarming: a quarter of British adults are thought to have used sunbeds. A questionnaire in two Liverpool schools revealed that 43% of 14- to 16-year-olds had used one, while a 2004 survey found that among Scottish primary school children aged between eight and 11, that number was 7%, some tanning as often as once a fortnight. If sunbeds are dangerous, Britain's tan enthusiasts of all ages either don't know, or don't care.
It is traditional, when discussing the popularity of bronzed skin, to blame Coco Chanel for our modern-day infatuation. The fashion designer, according to melatonin legend, was happily milky of skintone until she accidentally took too much sun while holidaying on the Duke of Westminster's Mediterranean yacht in 1923; photographed by the press as she disembarked, she unwittingly sparked a fashion for the tanned that has remained with us ever since.
Certainly through for much of history, it was pale skin to which fashionable society aspired, suggestive of a leisurely life spent indoors rather than hours of sweaty, midday toil in the fields. Women in ancient Greece and Rome painted their faces with assorted supposedly lightening substances; during the Renaissance, European women applied corrosive white lead to their faces. For 18th- and 19th-century ladies, staying out of the sun, rather than lying in it for as long as possible, was the thing.
But Robert Mighall, an academic turned writer who has researched the cultural history of the modern obsession with sunshine, disputes the Chanel connection – and even that our love of suntanning was principally sparked by fashion.
Much more influential, he argues in his book Sunshine: Why We Love the Sun, was John Harvey Kellogg, who as well as inventing Corn Flakes also developed the sunbed. Kellogg's first "incandescent light bath", invented in 1891, was popularised in the decade that followed, with both Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Edward VII reputed to have used them for therapeutic purposes, the latter installing units in Buckingham Palace and Windsor castle to relieve his gout. At the same time, a Danish physician, Niels R Finsen had opened an institute of "phototherapy" in Copenhagen before the turn of the century. The London hospital in Whitechapel installed so-called Finsen lights in 1900 to treat skin conditions, an application which won Finsen the Nobel prize for medicine.
"Sun baths" and sun lamps, in other words, were first popularised for their medical rather than fashion benefits. "This has always been an issue of health, whether positive or negative," says Mighall. The fashionable set were in fact the last to jump aboard; it was 1927, he says, before the first tanned face appeared in Vogue.
Whatever the original cause, the 20th century developed into a new bronze age of deepening infatuation with the tan. Colour movies, the "jet set" and the increased accessibility of foreign travel in the latter half of the century have all been credited with making the suntan, for the first time in history, suggestive of wealth and glamour rather than poverty and drudgery. Increasingly, having a tan became an end in itself: one 2000 survey found that for 50% of Britons, coming home with a tan was the single most important reason for going on holiday in the first place. Britain's stubbornly gloomy climate doesn't help: it is perhaps significant that Scotland has the highest number of sunbeds per head in the UK.
Mighall admits, however, that in recent years fashion has come to play the dominant role in the popularity of suntans. Where sunbed users in the 1970s might have been circumspect about the source of their glow, any sense of stigma has disappeared from the suggestion that a suntan, whether from a bottle or sunbed, is "fake". This is particularly true among teeangers, he says, for whom fakeness has become in itself a fashion. "These days among the young, it's like bling for the skin. There's a conscious embrace of a deep tan, which might have been seen as vulgarity, but is now really fashionable." So entrenched in celebrity culture is the vogue for a deep, surrealistic mahogany tan, as enthusiastically adopted by Jordan or Victoria Beckham, that several schools in Scotland, rather than challenge the fashion, now run classes in applying bottle tans. It is also notable that, as Professor Alex Elliott, chair of Comare, has commented, childhood sunbed use is associated with areas of comparative deprivation, the tan once again suggesting poverty rather than wealth.
It is its popularity among the very young that is the most worrying part of the phenomenon, according to cancer campaigners – large-scale studies have shown that using sunbeds below the age of 30 increases cancer risk by 75%. This week's research has led to renewed calls for under 18s to be banned from using sunbeds – the Scottish parliament already has plans to do so – but without regulation of the industry, argue cancer campaigners, misuse of tanning facilities could continue. While many salons are careful to promote responsible tanning, malpractice appears to be widespread: a study two years ago of 332 salons in Northern Ireland by the British Association of Dermatologists found that only half vetted clients for age, while a quarter were using sunbeds of a type intended only for medical rather than cosmetic use. (Interestingly, left to judge their own skin type, 30% of the local population, which is overwhelmingly fair-skinned, believed themselves to have type V or VI skin – categorised as dark Asian or black.) The Sunbed Association, while resisting many of the health risks claimed by campaigners, has said that it would welcome government regulation.
In such a culture, says Hazel Nunn, a health information manager with Cancer Research UK, it is clear that cancer risks are being ignored. "We have known for years that too much UV is the main case of skin cancer, but the problem is it is often easier to ignore it. There are some things that people enjoy doing, and whether that's going out and getting suntanned or smoking, people are reluctant to want to admit that there's any evidence of potential harm. They will pull out every little thing that suggests it might not be true, just so they can carry on with what they are doing." Just as the ban on smoking has cut the number of smokers, she argues, the case for banning sunbed use among children is now irresistible.
But can legislation really overcome our culture's infatuation with closing our eyes, peeling off our clothing and exposing ourselves to the sun? "Are the government going to come along and say you can't go on holiday until you are 18, or you can't go anywhere hot?" says one tanning salon manager who asks not to be named. "It's all about responsibility."
Mighall is more emphatic. "Why does the sun feel good? For me, it's not about have a tan, it's about seeing the blue sky and feeling the sun on your face. Let's not forget the sun is the source of all life in this planet. It would be a great shame, and a huge design flaw in the universe, if the thing that gives us life comes to be seen as this absolutely pernicious influence."
