If, like me, you grew up in the ’90s and early ’00s, you might be watching the Y2K resurgence with a mixture of fondness and mild amusement. Between the cargo pants, frosted lips, and the Mean Girls reboot, you could be forgiven for thinking it was 2004—not 2024. But one thing from that period I definitely didn’t foresee making a triumphant comeback? Tanning beds.
The world’s first tanning salon opened in the late 1970s, but it wasn’t until the early noughties that the device reached its heyday, with celebrities like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Tara Reid, and Nicole Richie leading the bronzed (or oranged) charge. With little to no knowledge of the risks, I frequented tanning salons myself. I was desperate to maintain a year-round tan like everyone else of my age–even during dreary winter, when it was clear my bronze glow could have come from nowhere besides a tanning bed or a bottle.
Back then, tanning lotion wasn’t the obvious choice if you wanted to avoid being pasty: The formulas on offer were definitely more “orange you glad to see me” than St Tropez. So tanning beds seemed to be the superior choice, and we felt no shame about waltzing into a tanning shop to bake ourselves. Some became so obsessed that words like “tanorexia” and the famed “gym-tan-laundry” mantra entered the lexicon—then, doctors finally began to weigh in.
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We now know that tanning beds have been “proven to increase risks of developing skin cancer, eye damage, and premature aging,” and that “regular use is associated with a higher risk of developing melanoma and other skin conditions,” shares Louise Walsh, a dermatology nurse practitioner and a skin cancer specialist. In the United States, now more than 30 states regulate indoor tanning for those under the age of 18 as the fad seemed to slip away and people grasped the severity of the risks over time. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, an estimated 9,500 people in the United States receive a skin cancer diagnosis every day.
That’s why it was so baffling this week when Kim Kardashian–a skincare brand founder who is famously extremely preoccupied with anti-aging and health–proudly showed off that, not only does she currently use a tanning bed, but that she does so frequently enough to warrant having one installed in her office.