The Pale One speaks out!

I was hugely impressed by Girls Aloud member Nicola Roberts’ challenge to the nation's obsession with tanning in her BBC 3 documentary ‘The Truth about Tanning’ (see it on BBC iPlayer). She has clearly felt pressurised in the past to ‘colour up’ and battles with the toughest problem of all, being naturally pale.

Nicola went on a quest to highlight the problems of an increasingly tan obsessed Britain as skin cancer and other serious health concerns connected with harmful sun rays are on the rise. As with Michael Jackson’s bizarre obsession to look whiter, so the extreme tanners have a fixation to look orange; not unlike an Oompa-Loompa!

She met women whose addiction had lead to early aging and malignant melanomas that had to be removed by surgery – which she pluckily watched. This took the journey down to of Westminster where she put her full support behind a bill to ban sun beds for under-18s. She met people along the way who were regularly using sun beds from a very young age. Nicola met Welshman Tom whose addiction was so strong he felt the need to inject himself with an unproven and under-certified tanning drug in order to seek the perfect colour. He was so hooked she challenged him to kick the habit for a month. Admittedly he was entertaining, and looked far better after taking time off the sun beds, but his best line was that it “took some ginger woman from Girls Aloud to make me go cold turkey.”

Nicola displayed a real passion for her quest and delivered the show in an honest and down to earth (Liverpudlian way. I thought she did a great job addressing a difficult subject and one that can have such severe consequences. The message, like everything else, is tan in moderation.

What do APA Members think and where do we stand on legislation to control sun bed tanning?

Gareth