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Gen Z Is Bringing Back Tanning, and Dermatologists Are Begging Them to Stop

TikTok tanning advice is encouraging some young people to chase high UV days, which is basically sun damage with branding.

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It’s burned into memory like it was yesterday: walking out of a tanning booth in 2006, peeling off the little Playboy bunny sticker to see how golden the session got you. It was a trend that elder millennials followed blindly, and most of us eventually came around on why it was a terrible idea. Gen Z, it seems, is less convinced. Armed with UV index trackers and TikTok tanning tutorials, they’re picking up right where we left off.

The American Academy of Dermatology surveyed Americans on sun safety earlier this year, and the results weren’t great. One-third got sunburned in 2025, with Gen Z experiencing the worst burns. Also, two-thirds of all respondents rated their own sun safety knowledge as........

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