Is it possible to get a ‘healthy’ tan?

“We still have a long way to go with our attitudes towards sun safety, and to be honest I thought your generation would have a different attitude towards donning a tan…”

If you grew up in Australia, you probably remember the PSA the Cancer Council aired relentlessly during summer. The intimidating (and for some reason British?) man would warn us that “there’s nothing healthy about a tan”. This was just one of the many jarring ads on TV at the time, airing alongside those gruesome WorkSafe ads and Transport Accident Commission campaigns.

Those images and slogans are hard to forget. But despite all of those ads being very credible and often quite moving, the sun safety ads just never seemed to stick. Most of the time I see people talking about sun safety in reference to preventing aging. Of course, there’s plenty of evidence to support this and I don’t question it. But I find it strange that we’re quicker to slip, slop and slap if it helps to preserve our appearance, not because it could cost us our health. 

Care about safe and ethical beauty? So do we. Have a look through our Beauty section. 

I suppose it’s like what people say about plain packaging on cigarettes; people would be more likely to give up smoking if the warning labels said that you’d have erectile dysfunction or really bad breath. These statements are a bee’s dick in comparison to the severity of emphysema, blindness or cancer – but somehow, I think the saying is true. Unfortunately, the majority of us are vainer than we care to admit, and despite some dangers, if it means it might make us look better, we’ll take the risk. 

We know that melanoma can have devastating effects, so why are still so willing to ignore expert advice when it comes to sun safety? I had a chat with cosmetic physician Dr Fiona Milne who gave me some insight from a medical perspective. 

Why do you think we still associate tanned skin with attractiveness and why is there such a huge tanning culture in Australia?

I think it’s because we associate bronzed skin with being active and outdoorsy, which we collectively associate with health here in Australia. But I also think it stems from generational ignorance to a degree. Our grandmothers would often tell us we’d look better with a bit of colour, so I think those beauty ideals get indirectly passed down between generations.

Also, some of my clients believe that bronzed skin helps them look slimmer and covers the flaws in their skin. I’m not sure how true that always is. But really at the end of the day, it comes down to it just being another beauty standard…

Do you think people really understand and care about the dangers of tanning?

I think people are more aware of the dangers in Australia as opposed to somewhere like Europe; we have great campaigns that warn us about how dangerous tanning can be. That being said, it only takes one sunny day in Melbourne, and everyone runs down to the beach and starts sizzling away. There’s a misconception that a moderate amount of sun is okay, so long as you don’t burn. But that’s not actually true.

We still have a long way to go with our attitudes towards sun safety, and to be honest I thought your generation would have a different attitude towards donning a tan considering there has been such an increase in research regarding sun safety in recent years. But that hasn’t really happened; people still take the risk.

Is it even possible to acquire a ‘healthy’ tan?

No, not really. People argue that there are health benefits and that it’s important to get vitamin D from the sun, but the amount of vitamin D that you need daily is actually very small. Really, you could get away with having one part of your body exposed… to the sun for a few minutes a day and you’d get an adequate amount of vitamin D, even in the morning or evening when the UV index is low. So there’s no need to bake in the sun all day. 

Never mind that it’s shocking for aging. If you speak to anyone in my age group, they are all lamenting their time spent in the sun. A lot of my work is improving people’s skin after years of it being sun damaged – we’re talking premature wrinkling, thinning of the skin, pigmentation problems [and] age spots – and that’s just the cosmetic side. To be honest, it’s really hard work trying to cosmetically improve skin once it’s already been damaged by the sun. All you need to do is compare the quality of your skin between [the] parts that regularly are exposed and [the] parts that are hidden away.

Some products including nasal sprays and injections suggest that they can boost melanin production to darken the skin. It’s illegal to sell these products but do they work? What makes them unsafe/unethical?

Those products by definition are not TGA-approved. Therefore, they’re unregulated. At the end of the day, you could research the side effects on Google, but you really don’t know what’s in these products. They’re unregulated. They could have all sorts of damaging chemicals or nasty additives in them. The list of side effects I imagine would be as long as your arm, anything from rashes [and] gastric upset, to serious cancers. Besides, there’s no way to ensure how much one injection will affect you.

What you’re doing is trying to stimulate melanin production in your skin, so the outcome could be completely unpredictable. You wouldn’t want to be messing around with your appearance in an unsafe way. Anyway, increasing melanin production also doesn’t mean you are protected from skin cancer. Just because someone has darker skin, or tans easily, [it] doesn’t mean they can’t get melanoma. You don’t need to burn to get melanoma either.

What would you want our readers to know about tanning and sun safety this summer?

Listen to the sun smart messaging. It’s gotta be factor 30+ at least. Also, it might be worth going the extra mile and covering up when the UV index is really high. If you really want to be brown, just use the fake stuff. As long as that’s something you spray or rub on, not something that you inject or snort.

For advice on picking the right sunscreen for you, try this.