Issue date: 11/5/09 Section: Opinions

Our generation is rarely accused of being overly hard working. We are known for lounging, drinking, Tweeting, Facebooking, MySpacing, video-gaming and complaining. We are known for procrastination, lamentation, degradation and general laziness.

So, it seems a bit on the odd side that so many college students these days strive to achieve the look of the common worker, the day laborer: The tan.

Never before have so many people gone to such great lengths and expended so much time, money and energy to become as bronze as possible. It is quite the opposite of the look much of the rest of the world and most cultures throughout history have desired.

Looking as pale as possible was often quite an attractive feature among European countries over the centuries. To look tan was to wear a full-body example of one's position in a lower societal caste. It was to admit one was not of nobility but, in fact, had to perform actual labor - quite a disgusting proposition among medieval elite and contemporary collegiates alike.

There is the obvious health risks that come along with tanning that so many choose to ignore. If being tan is a healthy look, then why are people engaging the epidermal equivalent of smoking? It does, after all, lead to cancer.

In an article that appeared in Arizona State University's The State Press, Joe Brown, a naturopathic doctor who works with cancer patients in Tempe, said "Skin cancer is a constant problem he sees among patients. If you stood out in the sun, the UV rays only penetrate the top layer of skin. The tanning booths are actually penetrating deeper down into the dermis of the skin."

He said many college students are using tanning beds for longer periods of time that eventually result in the formation of moles that then become cancerous moles.

In Wednesday's edition of The Daily Eastern News, Jo Ellen Jacobs, a philosophy professor at Millikin University, said she learned during a "Semester at Sea" that upon traveling to many countries, one cannot avoid the advertisements for skin whiteners and lighteners.

What? The rest of the world differs in opinion from the United States? Impossible.

But, in fact, Jacobs said "At no other time in history of people on Earth has it happened that we actually want women to have tanner skin…Hairstyles change, whether you tattoo or don't tattoo, whether you wear your clothes this way or that way changes but there are some universal constants throughout the world."

She said symmetry is a universal form of beauty and by preferring tan skin to pale is "comparable to considering asymmetry as a form of beauty."

And who wants that? Perhaps Vincent Van Gogh, but what did he know? He had one ear.

But seriously, it's a tad confusing to learn that, among young adults in the U.S., this notion of "tanner is better" is contradictory to half the planet's thinking.

And things get more curious the farther down the rabbit hole we go. One student quoted in The State Press article said she does not tan in the summer but does in the winter.

Everybody wants that "sticking-out-like-a-sore thumb" look as the rest of us get more pale as the winter drives us indoors. After all, who really wants to follow the natural order of things?

The point is, tanning is unhealthy, unnecessary and a waste of energy and money. Students should be less concerned with their looks and more with their grades. If students spent as much time in the library as they did in the tanning salon, Eastern would be graduating thousands of Rhodes scholars every year.

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