Victorian women valued porcelain-white skin and generally shunned the sun. People today want to sport what they call a "healthy tan" by sitting for hours under the sun. There is nothing healthy about a tan. Having one means sun-damage to the skin that can make you age faster. It also increases the risk of skin cancers.

The dangers of sun-damage are not appreciated because the consequences (wrinkles and skin cancers) do not appear until 10 - 20 years later. In Australia, where the beach culture has been particularly strong, the death rate from melanoma (cancerous mole) has increased from less than 1.0 per 100,000 between 1931-34 in both men and women to 5.0 and 2.4 per 100,000 in men and women respectively between 1990-94. Changing attitudes about tanning is more urgent now because we're getting much more sunlight because of the depletion of the earth's ozone layer.

If you want to see how much damage the sun has caused to your skin, just look at the difference between the skin on the inside of the upper arm, which is shaded from the sun, and the exposed skin on the outer part of the forearm. Just see for yourself how much better your skin would have been if you had protected your skin from the sun from an early age.