Brianna Parkins: We know sunbeds are bad for us so why does Kim Kardashian have one in her office?

Despite most of us never watching an episode of her TV show, we continually pick up more information about Kim Kardashian by accident than we ever intended. She is to our unconscious knowledge as Guinness pub glasses are to student houses. No one knows how we ended up with such a large amount without trying.

Social media is partly to blame as is our tendency to cover it in the media so that those who don’t spend hours on their phone everyday can still stay in the brain rot loop with the rest of us. This is why a disproportionate amount of people know Kim Kardashian has a tanning bed in her office.

Last week Kardashian gave us a tour of her skincare and make-up business office as a little treat to us plebs. Despite sounding like a suburban beauty salon set up by a girl you knew from school, her brand SKKN by Kim saw beauty company Coty snap a 20 per cent stake in 2020 at a $1 billion valuation. So we were expecting big things from the office tour – maybe some dishes of complementary Ferrero Rocher, mini bottles of water or nice pens.

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Instead, we found out she had Rick Owens custom design her office to look like a cross between an airport lounge and the saddest soft play centre in the world complete with a meeting pod made out of grey gymnastic mats.

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But aside from her all-neutral, all-beige interiors, the thing people found most upsetting was the phrase – “I’m Kim Kardashian of course I have a tanning bed and a red light bed in my office.”

Admitting you still have a tanning bed these days is a bit like insisting on still using lead paint to decorate your house. We all know they aren’t good for you by now so there isn’t really an excuse for keeping it up.

Australia and Brazil banned commercial solariums for cosmetic purposes in 2015 and 2009 respectively, with skin cancer prevention cited as the main reason. In Australia, research went deeper than melanoma rates to examine how solariums could be impacting the hip pocket of the country’s healthcare budget. Influential research from health economist Louisa Gordon in 2008 found an annual estimate of 43 deaths, 281 melanomas and 2,572 new cases of squamous cell carcinoma could be attributed to solarium use. Overall costing the health system $3 million AUD (€1.82 million) every year. Which is a lot of taxpayer money on something used primarily for vanity reasons. Of course the better reason for banning indoor tanning was to save lives, particularly young lives. The research found that for all sunbed users “the risk of squamous cell carcinoma is more than doubled compared with non-users” which is a grim enough statistic on its own. But it gets worse – “the risk is higher for those younger than 35 years at first solarium use.”

In balancing up saving lives and reducing pressure on the health system against people’s desire to get a “lovely colour”, it became a no-brainer for Australian governments to bin the lot. As a result, most Aussies in their early thirties and younger have never seen the inside of a solarium.

UK researchers teamed up with Gordon to complete a similar study of how indoor tanning impacts not just the health outcomes of citizens but also costs to the healthcare system. The research tracked the projected impact of sunbed use on the national 18-year-old cohort at the time – 618,873 adults. It found that a ban on commercial tanning and a public information campaign “would result in 1,206 avoided cases of melanoma, 207 fewer melanoma deaths and 3,987 averted cases of keratinocyte cancers over the lifetime of all 18-year-olds living in England in 2019.”

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That’s on top of “healthcare cost-savings of £697,858”. So why do we still have sun beds at all? The World Health Organisation says using a sunbed at least once in a person’s life has a 20 per cent higher risk of developing melanoma with first-time users under 35 sunbeds jacking up their risk by 59 per cent.

Aside from the health complications, it’s also undignifying to stand or lie down in a sweaty light box, turning yourself over like a human rotisserie chicken. Surely we have better things to do with our time.

Kardashian, in her defence, has said she uses her sun bed to ease her psoriasis. The American National Psoriasis Foundation (NPF) has said tanning beds in commercial salons emit mostly UVA, not UVB light, and the beneficial effect for psoriasis is attributed primarily to UVB. The NPF does not support the use of indoor tanning beds as a substitute for phototherapy performed with a prescription and under a health care provider’s supervision.

While it’s delightfully Celtic Tiger chic of Kardashian to have a tanning bed in her office, the evidence is clear we should all leave them where they belong – in the past.