Tanning beds triple skin cancer risk, study finds

PARIS, France (AFP) — When Heidi Tarr was a teenager, she used a tanning bed several times a week with her friends because they all wanted to glow like a celebrity.

“It was just the thing to do — everyone wanted that nice, dark, tan skin,” the 49-year-old market researcher told Agence France-Presse via video call from Chicago.

Then one day in her 30s, Tarr noticed a strange mole on her back.

It was a melanoma — the deadliest form of skin cancer. She was lucky to have caught it early on, but has needed over a dozen biopsies to remove more moles.

Now her 15-year-old daughter Olivia is seeing trending videos on TikTok of people showing off their tan lines — and is asking her mother how to get some.

So Tarr was inspired to get yet another skin sample removed, this time to be used in research published in the journal Science Advances on Friday.

The study found that people who use tanning beds are nearly three times more at risk of getting skin cancer.

It also marked the first time researchers have pinpointed how sunbeds cause DNA mutations in the skin that make users more susceptible to cancer.

More than 80 percent of the most common melanomas are caused by exposure to ultraviolet radiation, according to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.