What Will It Take to Get Young People to Stop Tanning (Again)?

21.05.2026, 19:31 allure.com

If your college schedule looked anything like mine, you had a biology lecture at 8 a.m., your news reporting and writing class (that one came in handy) at 11, then a visit to the tanning salon around the corner before a 3 p.m. study group.

A few weeks ago, I took a drive through my alma mater, the University of Minnesota. This campus was once home to multiple tanning salons, most notably Darque Tan, a sleek, modern, all-white space managed by a deeply bronzed young man in designer jeans named Alex. From 2006 to 2010, I lay there buck naked on a plastic bed for a couple of hours a week, soaking up UV rays from the dozens of blindingly bright bulbs that surrounded my body. Whenever I could, I’d hop over to Darque, pop a heart sticker on my hip, and get in a quick 15-minute session while listening to Britney Spears.

But Darque Tan is no more. And neither is the Planet Beach Tan near my first off-campus house (though the franchise still exists elsewhere in Minneapolis-St. Paul). Also no more: the tanning bed in the basement of the salon in the on-campus hamlet that U of M students call Dinkytown. There are no tanning beds anywhere within walking distance of a classroom or dorm. When I asked a 19-year-old college freshman at my alma mater if she and her friends partake in indoor tanning, she confirmed that they do—but unlike prior generations of sorority sisters, who used to hop in the car and drive five minutes to a salon right off campus, they have to carpool to a nearby suburb to access a tanning bed.

Back in 2015, Allure conducted an investigation into the number of tanning beds on college campuses. Nearly half of America’s top 125 colleges and universities had tanning beds on campus or in off-campus housing. At many of these institutions, students could even use their meal cards to pay for a daily dose of UV radiation in addition to a breakfast sandwich or French fries.

Since that 2015 story ran, however, most campuses have stopped offering free or reduced-price tanning, and many of those near-campus salons have closed their doors. One of the salons we mentioned in the original piece, Indiana’s Big Ten Tan—located in a building leased by the Purdue Research Foundation and so close to Purdue University that Google Maps placed it on campus—is now closed. Arizona State University’s Vista del Sol apartment complex no longer includes “tanning” on its amenities list. Sun Tan City, the massive chain with more than 250 locations across the United States that once donated $3 million to the University of Kentucky, still appears to sponsor some college dance teams, but we’re heartened to see the dancers only mention getting spray tans in posts on social media. Does this all mean that young people have, for the most part, stopped tanning?

The short answer is no. “There's good news, and there's bad news,” says Sherry Pagoto, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Connecticut, who has done several studies related to tanning bed culture—including the 2015 study that inspired our article. “With indoor tanning, that’s where the good news is: We’re looking at maybe only 3% of young adults and teenagers using tanning beds anymore.” (Compare that to 2013, when 8.6% of people ages 18 to 29 reported using tanning beds.)

Dr. Pagoto confirms that after her 2015 study was published (and featured in Allure), many campuses severed their relationships with tanning salons and stopped allowing students to use their campus cards to pay for UV radiation. Changing cultural attitudes about indoor tanning did have an impact on this cohort’s tanning bed usage, and Dr. Pagoto notes that the COVID-19 pandemic put another nail in the sunbed coffin with lockdowns and an increased interest in health and wellness.

Plus, we’re learning more and more about just how incredibly harmful indoor tanning is. A 2025 study from Northwestern Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco, found that indoor tanning can actually triple your risk of skin cancer, compared to those who have never tanned indoors. People are (mostly) more aware than ever that tanning beds can cause some significant health issues.

Plenty of work has been done to spread the word that outdoor tanning is dangerous, too. The National Council for Skin Cancer Prevention kick-started the Skin Smart Campus initiative, which had a favorable impact on sun safety practices among students, with things like targeted social media posts and on-campus sunscreen dispensers that increased students’ regular use of SPF 30+. The program has since evolved and currently lives under the umbrella of Impact Melanoma, a nonprofit dedicated to melanoma education and awareness. It also recently endorsed a new four-part web series called The Burning Truth, hosted by dermatologist Dr. Whitney Bowe and her 14-year-old daughter Maclane. In each episode—airing on Dr. Bowe's Instagram and TikTok channels and produced in partnership with La Roche-Posay—the dermatologist and other science educators and personalities (like Dancing With the Stars Witney Carson) debunk false claims about sun safety.

So then, what’s this about bad news? Well, despite all of this research and education, young people are still tanning. A lot more than you’d think. A 2025 survey by the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) revealed that half of Gen Z participants got a sunburn in 2024, and 25% said that getting a tan was important to them, regardless of their future health or the aesthetic impact. Dr. Pagoto has seen this among her own 18-year-old daughter’s peers. They’re not interested in tanning beds, but they’re still very interested in getting tan.

Of course, we have to point out that “the tanner, the better” attitude is most prevalent among one demographic: Though it’s been a while since any formal research was published, a 2008 study found that white women were most likely to use indoor tanning beds. A 2013 study found that 29.3% of “non-Hispanic white female high school students” used an indoor tanning bed, and 16.7% of them did so frequently. Meanwhile, rampant colorism means that many Black and brown women have been told to practice “religious avoidance of the sun.”

“The victory around tanning beds is a good one because they are particularly dangerous, but the sun is not safe either.”

Does this mean the younger generation has embraced “laying out” in lieu of lying in a tanning bed? That's exactly what it means. They’re tanning “the natural way”—under the actual noonday sun of the backyard or pool deck or rooftop or quad. “The victory around tanning beds is a good one because they are particularly dangerous, but the sun is not safe either,” says Dr. Pagoto, who notes that she’s also done research around sunless tanning and was hoping more people would shift to that approach, given the pretty incredible innovations available in spray tanning and at-home tanning.

But in recent years, social media has supercharged the currency of a real tan. As I write this, searches for “tanning” are growing more than 30% year over year on Google, TikTok, and Instagram, according to Spate Data. If you take a scroll through the suntan-y side of social media apps, you’ll see creators sharing their “tanning credentials”: photos of glowing, bronzed skin paired with rules like “being consistent” and sitting out every day from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. They create timed routines for tanning and share glimpses of their very obvious tan lines as proof of progress—and a covetable memento for viewers to try and replicate in their own backyards.

In addition to sharing those “GRWM to lay out” routines and favorite tanning accelerator products—most formulated without any SPF—tanning creators are also closely tracking the UV Index, which measures the intensity of the sun’s rays, to optimize their UV exposure. There are even several smartphone apps, with names like SunIQ and SunTracker, specifically dedicated to tracking the index and creating tanning routines, including timed notifications to apply oil or to flip over. This is antithetical to what this scale was intended for, says Laurel Geraghty, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Medford, Oregon. “The UV Index was created to help people identify the strength of the sun's rays to help prevent sunburn and skin cancer,” she explains. “Now, they use it to determine when they can get the most intense blast of ultraviolet light for the fastest tan or burn.” How would Dr. Geraghty characterize the phenomenon? “Horrifying.”

Youthful tanners know that tanning is dangerous; the education today is so much better than it was when I was tingling my way through a 20-minute session of UV light. So why are they doing it, especially when they’re also obsessed with skin care and afraid of aging?

One theory: The 2000s are in the trend cycle again; low-rise jeans, body glitter, and the very thin, very tan aesthetic have all made a comeback. It's only natural to mimic what you see on your screen in your real life, much as I did with tabloid pictures of Britney, Christina, and Paris. For many, looking tan means looking thinner, with more even-toned skin, and even less acne. (That’s not actually true, as tanning can make acne and post-acne scars worse, but the idea persists.)

“There's a big gap between what you look like and what you think you should and could look like, and that gap is what really drives people's dissatisfaction about the way their skin looks and their weight,” says Jerod Stapleton, PhD, professor of health, behavior, and society at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, who has been studying tanning bed usage since the early 2000s, including its impact on body image. Tanning—wherever you do it—is designed to alleviate some of those negative feelings, much in the way a $7 latte can help you deal with a bad day, even if it’s outside your budget. “It's that immediate, I'm not feeling great, and this helps me feel better in the moment, kind of thing that underlies a lot