Students turn to tanning salons as a way to relax and preserve their summer-bronzed skin.
Elizabeth Duncan can say it loud: she’s bronze and she’s proud. The sophomore with a penchant for Nelly and the life sciences has another passion—basking in the artificial light of a tanning bed.
“Obviously I like laying out in the natural sun better, but this is so much easier with my schedule,” Duncan said from behind the wheel of her sunburn-red Pontiac Firebird. “You see people laying out on the quad while reading—I’d rather sleep or relax in the tanning bed. I just can’t read and tan at the same time.”
And so it is that Duncan, armed with a bottle of tan accelerating lotion, finds herself striding into K-Nails on Hillsborough Road most Friday afternoons. Citing stress relief and a need to “escape Duke” as two of her goals, the olive-skinned West Virginian has been getting her tanning fix ever since her high school days. “There have been psychological studies that show that you’re happier when you tan,” she insisted. “It’s something about the light.”
The ambiance of K-Nails, Duncan warns, is not quite like the day spa environment. Homey touches, including plastic floral arrangements and a half-dozen low-resolution Monet prints, fall short of fostering a luxurious atmosphere. Other furnishings, like the vibrating purple massage chairs in the main lobby, are even more detrimental to achieving a spa-like calm. “I just go to this place because it’s cheap and it’s close,” Duncan said as she wound her way through drywall partitions to stall No. 2.
In terms of process, Duncan insists, things are pretty straightforward. “I like to sanitize my goggles just to make sure,” she said, dousing the blue rubber frames in antibacterial cleanser and wiping them with a towel. “After that, you just take off all your clothes and get in.”
The “getting in” part could prove challenging to those with claustrophobic inclinations—K-Nails’ beds resemble glowing MRI scanners. “These beds are... well, they’re okay. Here I usually do 20,” she said, referencing the built-in minute meter on the outer casing of the machine.
Duncan, it seems, is far from an anomaly; “tanorexics” are everywhere on campus, promoting their nut-brown complexions as a definitively beautiful characteristic. “I feel like Duke’s Southern culture plays into the idea that tanning is important,” said freshman Amy Feagles, another tanning devotee. “I don’t know the science of the mental health benefits, but here I feel that it’s more about appearances than drowning your sorrows.”
Regardless of the driving motivation behind banishing pasty pallor, no hard-core tanner will deny that the costs can add up. Some of the more expensive salons can charge more than $30 per 20-minute session, a hefty price tag when weekly visits add up. Feagles sees this as a sign that tanning is rapidly becoming the latest symbol of status. “If you’re not affluent, you’re not going to have the extra $20 lying around to go tanning,” she said. “You can easily drop $80-$100 a month. Easily.”
Beyond spare cash, however, some tanners are willing to compromise spending in other areas to splurge at the salon. “I was at the mall, and I thought to myself, hmm, I have $20, do I want to tan or eat lunch?” said Feagles, tongue in cheek. “Then I thought, well, tanning makes you tan, and food makes you fat, so I went tanning.”
Not everyone agrees that direct UV-exposure is as low-risk as loyal tanners would have you believe. Spray-on tans have their own fan base. “Go sunless,” sophomore Stacie Ulanch said. “Yes, it’s more expensive, but you only have to go once, and it doesn’t kill you. Who wants to pay for skin cancer?”
Even with serious health repercussions and the money-sapping quality of being a Coppertone poster-girl, tanning is not likely to lose its popularity. The health consequences of activities like drinking and smoking have long been widely publicized, but significant declines in these unhealthy practices have yet to be seen.
“It’s easy to dismiss the fact that tanning is unhealthy because you don’t see it immediately,” Feagles said. “If you’re hung over, you feel like crap and you know right away that it’s bad for you.”
Conversely, Duncan seems to think the only thing keeping tanning from becoming an all-out fad is the scarcity of local beds.
“Someone would make a fortune if they put a salon on campus,” she said.
Fuqua entrepreneurs, take note.
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