Appeal to Britons’ vanity to protect them from skin cancer

Analysis: Cancer experts warn there’s ‘no such thing as a healthy tan’ as melanoma rates soar

Sun damage increases risk of cancer but also ages the skin prematurely and leads to moles and lesions which may leave scarring when removed (Getty)

As well as killing the planet, the boom in budget air fares has also been blamed for contributing to soaring rates of melanoma skin cancers.

Analysis by Cancer Research UK (CRUK) warns that melanoma diagnoses have jumped 45 per cent in the UK in the past decade, and are rising fastest in younger people.

A result of the big summer holiday now stretching into multiple winter weekend getaways, minibreaks and jaunts to sun-soaked shores is that fairer-skinned Britons are getting more sun than their genes have adapted to handle.

But the root of this is the way advertisers – and their more latest incarnation as Instagram and other social media influencers – have sold us the idea that being tanned is associated with good health.

As CRUK puts it “there’s no such thing as a healthy tan” and it is trying to break this link by launching an “own your tone” campaign to encourage people with fairer skin not to put themselves at risk by chasing a tan.

While melanoma survival has doubled in the past 40 years, and 90 per cent of people diagnosed live beyond 10 years it is notoriously hard to treat once cancerous cells have expanded beyond the skin to the blood vessels and spread to the liver or other organs.

The real irony is that the quest for a perfect tan is actually going to leave you looking worse in the long run.

A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine detailed the case of a truck driver whose face was drastically aged by sun damage, but only on the left side which had spent decades alongside his window.

While celebrities like Hugh Jackman regularly shares pictures of his scarred and bandaged face after having a cancerous growth removed, in a bid to make his fellow Australians – who have the highest rates of skin cancer in the world – wear suncream.

In the end it could be that appealing to our innate vanity, rather than self-preservation instinct, is the way to have the most lasting impact on skin cancer rates.