'Tanorexia' - It's only a matter of time
Summertime and the Brits are once again out in force - the second the sun peeps out from behind the clouds, we're out on beaches and lying around in parks like flies around shit, arms and legs akimbo and quite honestly, more flesh hanging out than you would expect to see on a nudist beach in the South of France. Later that day, Facebook statuses all over will pronounce different levels of burntness and the swarms will head home covered in dodgy tanlines which, sadly, will make people feel proud and everybody else will yawn as they show them off at the office the next day. It's rather embarassing. One more to add to the list.
Once again, tanning and links to skin cancer have hit the headlines. This time, research has found that 26% of teenagers in the UK have admitted to getting sunburnt on purpose in order to get a tan, around a third (31%) said they have never used sun cream in this country and more than half (55%) believe the sun is not so powerful in the UK. As much as I hate it, I can feel a tanorexia headline coming on, they love it. This obsession, however, is not an illness - the consequences may be, but the act of sprawling in the sun or frazzling away on a sunbed without protection is a decision which really, we all should by now have the knowledge to decide against, do the right thing and smother ourselves in suncream. Factor 4 doesn't count.
It's not just teens. At Glastonbury 2010, 3000 people were treated for sunstroke and I saw literally thousands of revellers sporting scarlet backs, faces, legs... pretty much everything that could burn, was burnt. My friends and I regularly massaged the annoying but necessary goo into each others' backs etc, but the majority ignored the dangers, shrugged it off and turned their noses up to creaming themselves. Stupidity personified.
What is it about Brits? Obesity, smoking our lungs to death, drinking our livers to death and sunning ourselves to melanoma-land... it's almost as though we're all asking to suffer. We know what we have to do to be healthy, so why do we ignore all the warnings? Is it that inbuilt mechanism that tells us it will never happen to us, or do we just not care? Sad world.
If we could only witness the consequences of such dangerous behaviours, see someone close to us suffer as a result of pissing all over the warnings, maybe, just maybe we would learn to take precautions, look after ourselves and get rid of that disgusting British cockiness we seem to have adopted.
So, enjoy the sun, but for God's sake, wear sunscreen.
Once again, tanning and links to skin cancer have hit the headlines. This time, research has found that 26% of teenagers in the UK have admitted to getting sunburnt on purpose in order to get a tan, around a third (31%) said they have never used sun cream in this country and more than half (55%) believe the sun is not so powerful in the UK. As much as I hate it, I can feel a tanorexia headline coming on, they love it. This obsession, however, is not an illness - the consequences may be, but the act of sprawling in the sun or frazzling away on a sunbed without protection is a decision which really, we all should by now have the knowledge to decide against, do the right thing and smother ourselves in suncream. Factor 4 doesn't count.
It's not just teens. At Glastonbury 2010, 3000 people were treated for sunstroke and I saw literally thousands of revellers sporting scarlet backs, faces, legs... pretty much everything that could burn, was burnt. My friends and I regularly massaged the annoying but necessary goo into each others' backs etc, but the majority ignored the dangers, shrugged it off and turned their noses up to creaming themselves. Stupidity personified.
What is it about Brits? Obesity, smoking our lungs to death, drinking our livers to death and sunning ourselves to melanoma-land... it's almost as though we're all asking to suffer. We know what we have to do to be healthy, so why do we ignore all the warnings? Is it that inbuilt mechanism that tells us it will never happen to us, or do we just not care? Sad world.
If we could only witness the consequences of such dangerous behaviours, see someone close to us suffer as a result of pissing all over the warnings, maybe, just maybe we would learn to take precautions, look after ourselves and get rid of that disgusting British cockiness we seem to have adopted.
So, enjoy the sun, but for God's sake, wear sunscreen.