Although many people think otherwise, a good tan does not equal good health. In reality, tanning is the skin’s way of telling you that it has been damaged.

The American Osteopathic College of Dermatology endorses the position of the American Cancer Society and the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services on the topic of tanning.

And that position is that tanning, whether outdoors or indoors, poses a danger to one’s health.

A high school junior in frigid Vermont, Payet had been tired and unhappy for weeks when her family doctor gave her a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a fall and wintertime melancholy brought on by changes in ambient light, body temperature and hormone regulation. He told her to get some sun. “But it’s not like I could take a long vacation,” Payet recalls. “He said that going to a tanning bed would do the trick.”

She went three times a week from February right through the summer. For about the next three years, she’d pop in now and then. She didn’t realize there could be long-term effects: “I loved being tan, and I thought I looked and felt healthy.”