Solariums to be banned in Belgium? What does sundamage do to your skin?

Hello Steemians,

a topic i care much about! As you know i own a tanning salon for 6 years now (sunless that is...) and i see a lot of clients who have or had skin cancer, who had one or several melanomas removed, even one client, only 29 years old with severe skin cancer and spread to other parts of her body, she didn't make it... It sounds harsh but people need to wake up about this, skin cancer does kill people!!

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That's why i was delighted to read the news that Belgium is the 3rd country (after Australia and Brasil) in the world that wants to put a complete ban on commercial solariums. There were a lot of people against it, as you could read by the comments that could be found on social media, newspapers etc, but in my opinion, most of these negative comments were really ignorant, as if they really don't know any better. They showed comments as "come on, then you should prohibit travelling to the sun as well, etc..."
Well i don't think that has anything to do with it...
When someone goes sunbathing or even take a walk in the sun, most people now use a Sun Protection Factor, or sunlotion, to protect. I never heard of anyone putting a protective lotion on there skin before using a solarium. Also claims that solarium rays are safer that the sun are false... nothing that gives your skin a tan in that short period of time can be good for you.

Also, when they did a check of 199 solariums here in Belgium (concerning safety, hygiëne etc) only 12 of these 199 were completely in regulation with everything.

I know, a lot of us feel better with a tan, but there are other ways to do that. Just protect your skin, it's that important... It's better to get a light, slow tan, or not a tan at all than having to face the consequences.
Some of you will start another discussion about spraytanning, well upto today, it has always been approved by the FDA, and there is no scientific evidence whatsover (and i mean serious scientific evidence, not sensation news in some blogs...) that it could be bad for you. Of cours, when you would be directly inhaling the spraytan all the time on a daily basis, that would be something else, but who the hell does that, that's not even possible...

The good news is, something can be done to reduce cancer, when we look at Australia, they dramatically reduced their skin cancer rate after 30 years of campaigning and their ban on solariums. So it does take time, but it helps.
A friend of ours lives there and even as young as kindergarden, children are reminded on a daily basis there to put sunscreen on.

Now to see what the sun really does to your skin, this video is so cool to watch!
With a special ultraviolet light you can see what the sun or uv light has done to your skin, and what sunscreen does:

I hope this makes some people think twice and use sunscreen more, even in winter!

I love to hear your opinions about it!

have a nice day!!