Video: Get a Guilt-Free Summer Tan

From Denny: OK, I'm so fair that I regularly use SPF 50 - or 72 when I can find it - just to go pull a few weeds. When I "tan" naturally people are always telling me to go get some sun. So, I get to tell them this IS my dark tan! :) Oh, well, at least I can tan a little; my father could not tan at all. He would burn as red as a cooked lobster, then turn pale again: not even a slight tan.

I'm always skeptical of chemical anything. So, ask a lot of questions before you submit to a chemical tan. Look for natural ingredients. Take a little time and research what goes on to your skin, especially when it will be there for days or weeks. Your skin acts like a lung, breathing in substances and absorbing into your blood stream good things or not so good things. Eventually, substances make it into our body's fat stores, lurking to cause problems another day perhaps decades away.

For now, this chemically sprayed tan looks like a good alternative to baking and broiling in the summer sun. The cancer risk is far lower than direct exposure to the sun. Our global weather is becoming increasingly hotter every year with the melting of the glaciers who once kept us cooler. Keep the awareness that now the sun is less skin-friendly than when you were a child and the weather was milder. Just think of the folks in Australia who wear sun screen most of the year and stay indoors as much as possible. They were once a beach-loving culture just like America but the high rate of skin cancer changed all that. We may have to go to the same strategy eventually.

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