The Food & Drug Administration is scrapping a proposed rule that would ban American teenagers under 18 from using tanning beds. The rule, which was first proposed in 2015, aimed to restrict indoor tanning for minors for one very obvious reason: The UV light that these beds emit in high doses has been long-proven to cause skin cancer.
A spokesperson for the FDA told Allure in a statement that the agency withdrew the proposal “in order to reconsider the best means for addressing the issues covered by the Proposed Rule and related issues regarding access to sunlamp products.” Its decision came after the agency received more than 8,100 comments on the proposal—comments that they say ranged from “the dangers of UV radiation from sunlamp products” and the “vulnerability of young people to the risks of sunlamp products” to “support for personal choice and parental decision-making; availability” and “compliance burdens on small businesses.”
The notice of the withdrawal was signed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr., who is known to frequent indoor tanning salons himself. (When asked by The Atlantic a few months ago how he squares his tanning and nicotine habits with his day job, Kennedy replied, “I’m not telling people that they should do anything that I do. I just say ‘Get in shape.’”)
In its statement, the FDA acknowledges the scientific link between tanning beds and skin cancer. “Withdrawal of the proposed restrictions does not mean that exposure to UV radiation does not cause skin cancer. It is well established that exposure to UV radiation (including through sunlamp products) can lead to skin cancer,” the statement reads. Despite this, they encourage “users of sunlamp products to discuss the potential risks with their physician before using sunlamp products”—a statement that ignores the fact that the risks are not potential. They’re confirmed by science.
Tanning beds—like tobacco, formaldehyde, and asbestos—are classified as a group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). And that’s a message that many, many board-certified dermatologists have hammered home for Allure and our readers over the last three decades: Using tanning beds dramatically ups the likelihood of a skin cancer diagnosis. Full stop. These same dermatologists and health professionals now worry that the FDA’s withdrawal of this proposed tanning bed restriction sends a confusing message to minors and their parents. Susan C. Taylor, MD, FAAD, and president of the American Academy of Dermatology, released a statement this week saying that the organization was “disappointed.”
“Exposure to UV radiation from indoor tanning devices is associated with an increased risk of melanoma, as well as non-melanoma skin cancers, including squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma,” says Dr. Taylor. Part of what makes tanning beds so dangerous is that “they emit mostly UVA radiation and filter out the UVB that will burn you more readily—[tanning salons] don’t want you to burn, they want you to come back,” says Dendy Engleman, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City. “But UVA radiation ages you more readily, breaks down collagen more readily, and it’s more oncogenic, meaning cancer-causing.”
And late last year, new research from Northwestern Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco, revealed that tanning bed usage is in fact even more dangerous than we knew. Before then, it was thought that indoor tanners were about 75% percent more likely to develop melanoma than those who have never tanned indoors, and that just one session in a tanning bed could increase the risk by 20 percent. But this latest research found that tanning bed usage actually triples the risk of skin cancer—that’s a 200 percent increase. Not only that, through comparing 182 skin biopsies, the researchers showed the UV emitted from tanning beds caused unique DNA mutations, more damaging than previously known. “The takeaway is simple: Tanning beds don’t just age your skin, they biologically shift your cells toward cancer,” Mona Gohara, MD, a board-certified dermatologist and clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine Department of Dermatology, told Allure at the time.
