Sun Ban

"I'm an evangelist against this foolish suntanning habit," says U.C.L.A. Dermatologist Dr. J. Walter Wilson. "But trying to persuade people to stop lying in the sun for hours is as difficult as getting them to give up smoking." Simply put, suntans may look good but they are very bad medicine. The sun's rays eventually cause the skin to wrinkle and sag, aging effects seen most clearly on the back of a cowboy's neck. The rays also produce lentigines, the brown marks often called liver spots. By far the worst result, however, is skin cancer.

Though rarely fatal, the sun-induced cancers often require surgical removal. In all, estimates Dr. Wilson, "thirty percent of the practice of dermatologists is treating skin changes that have been brought about by sunlight."

The problem is a relatively modern one. Whether out of innate good sense or colonialist snobbery, whites up through the 19th century shunned the tropical sun, carried parasols, wore big-brimmed hats and left exposure to nonwhites, whom nature has kindly endowed with pigment protection. A white man's tan, in fact, is the result of a dark pigment that rises from mid-level layers of the skin in an effort to guard against further assaults by the sun. But such tanning was not thought of in the U.S. as a sign of health until the 1920s, after sunlight had been publicized as a treatment for tuberculosis. It does indeed increase body production of Vitamin D, which helps control TB, but it has no other beneficial effects except occasional help for a case of acne or psoriasis.

Sitting in the sunlight, says Dr. Wilson, is good only for plants. "If you don't have chlorophyll in your veins and arteries, direct sunlight can do you nothing but harm./- Human beings would be healthy if they lived inside a building or cave all the time and never went out in the sun." They would also, of course, be pallid, and in today's civilization a pasty hue is no sign of beauty. Aware of that, Dr. Wilson suggests use of an "instant tan" product. For those who insist on the sun, he advises the most ray-opaque lotions available.

/- It does most harm to light-complexioned persons. This is apparently not related to hair color, as widely thought, but to eye color. Most sun-susceptible colors: light green and light blue.

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