Hop onto TikTok and you’ll find many young people—mostly women—using tanning beds, a trend Seattle dermatologist Dr. Heather Rogers calls alarming after years of decline in indoor tanning. A 2025 American Academy of Dermatology survey found 20% of Gen Z prioritize getting a tan over protecting their skin, and 25% say it’s worth looking great now even if it means looking worse later.
A new study in Science Advances reinforces why that attitude is dangerous. Researchers compared medical records of nearly 3,000 tanning bed users with an age-matched group who never tanned indoors and found tanning bed users were nearly three times as likely to develop melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. The study also found DNA damage that can lead to melanoma across nearly the entire surface of the skin in tanning bed users.
Dr. Pedram Gerami, an author of the study and the IDP Foundation professor of skin cancer research at Northwestern University, says precursor mutations are present “even in skin cells that look normal” in tanning bed patients. The researchers observed a dose-response relationship: 10 to 50 tanning bed exposures doubled melanoma risk compared with controls, while more than 200 visits increased risk more than eightfold. Gerami notes that 200 exposures can accumulate quickly—about once a week for four years.
The team performed genetic sequencing on normal skin cells from tanning bed users, most of whom were younger women—the heaviest indoor tanners according to prior studies. Hunter Shain, an associate professor of dermatology at UCSF and co-author, says they were “stunned” to find women in their 30s and 40s with more mutations than people in their 70s and 80s from the general population. “They somehow were able to cram in two lifetimes’ worth of UV damage in 30 years,” Shain says.
Dr. Rogers points out tanning beds can emit ultraviolet radiation 10 to 15 times stronger than sunlight and are sometimes marketed as safer than the sun—claims this study undermines. Gerami says many patients in his high-risk melanoma clinic are women who began indoor tanning as teens for events like prom and now face frequent skin checks, biopsies, anxiety, and the emotional burden of a cancer diagnosis at a young age. Some of these patients donated skin samples to the study hoping to help others avoid the same fate.