Sunbeds and young people: an easy target for legislation?

Abstract

The advent of the social desirability of a tanned skin is generally attributed to Coco Chanel who, on returning from holiday on the French Riviera, proclaimed ‘The 1929 girl must be tanned’. For the next 50 years a uniform, tanned skin could only be achieved by sunbathing but in the 1970s, the sunbed industry was born following the development of high‐intensity ultraviolet (UV) A fluorescent lamps, the same lamps that allowed psoralen plus UVA (PUVA) therapy to be established. In the period subsequent to the late 1970s, there have been several reports on the demographics of sunbed use. A study in the BJD1 confirms a common feature of sunbed users, which has been present in all demographic studies ever since the first study of sunbed users in the U.K. appeared in this journal in 1986,2 that is, that young females are the predominant group who engage in cosmetic tanning. However, a worrying feature of the German study1 was the finding that age at initiation of sunbed use decreased significantly across birth cohorts from 25 to 19 years (25th percentile; cohorts 1966–75 to 1986–93).