At our school we are seeing many girls who have unseasonably tan skin. The only answer to this would have to be that they go tanning in the winter. But also some girls go to the tanning beds more than they should and that would have to be because they have full accesses to all the tanning beds, all the time. That is because they work at the tanning salons.

“I go tanning three times a week,” says Emmery Herrington who works at California Sun Centers in Lincoln. She gets to go in all the level one beds for free any time she wants! So why not go three times a week? Although people may think that tanning is really bad for you, tanning is your body's natural protection against sunburn - it is what your body is designed to do. Many have referred to this process as "damage" to your skin, but calling a tan "damage" is a dangerous oversimplification.

Although tanning can be very bad, UVA rays in tanning beds; have been known to cause very bad diseases like melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. Although Herrington says, “To catch a disease like that it has to run in your genes.”

Do the lotions really make you darker or really protect skin from the UVA rays? Some will say yes and some just don’t even care. “Lotions absolutely work in good ways. They put in what tanning takes out,” says Herrington. But burn protection products have made extraordinary amounts of money by being cleverly marketed to prevent cancer. So it has been known to be a scandal.

“I use the lotions: Addicted to Love, Tao, Bombshell, and Angel,” Herrington says. A different kind of lotion each time. Some of us people who don’t tan we think that people who do are just doing it way to much and don’t know when to stop. But Herrington says “When I look really bronze is when I think I am tan enough.”

So it is really just taking your own risk when you tan because people have many different views about what tanning does for you. You could get melanoma if it runs in your genes but as I said before! Just tan at your own risk.