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Jan K.
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The Healthy Life

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Suntan Information

by Power User Jan K. on March 07, 2011

5 Easy Ways To Protect Yourself Against Skin Cancer 

By Cosmopolitan


In addition to an annual screening by your derm, it's crucial that you give your skin a monthly once-over on your own.

Follow these simple steps, and if you see something suspicious, clue in your doc ASAP.

1) Stand next to a mirror in a well-lit room. Keep a hand mirror nearby so you can scan harder-to-view body regions, like your back and neck.

2) Start at the bottoms of your feet and work your way up your legs, torso, back, and arms, carefully examining any mole or mark.

3) ABCD is what you need to look for: Asymmetry (one side doesn't match the other), a jagged Border, a nonbrown Color or different colors within one mark, and/or a Diameter larger than a quarter inch.

4) Jot down a description of any spot, including its location and specific symptoms, so you'll have the details you'll need to tell your derm.

Related: Death By Suntan at Age 26

5) Don't forget your nails, your pubes, and your scalp, which you can see by aiming a blow-dryer so the air stream parts your hair.

Scary Truths Tanning Salons Deny

New research shows that indoor tanning increases your melanoma odds, yet salons keep customers in the dark about the risks. Cosmo teamed up with ABC News' 20/20 to expose their efforts to mislead you.

 

 

Cosmo has been covering the dangers of tanning beds as part of our ongoing Practice Safe Sun campaign. Now new research backs us up: An August 2009 report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified tanning devices as a definite carcinogen. And, the report said, if you tan indoors before age 30, your skin-cancer risk rises by 75 percent.

But you likely won’t hear this from your local salon. That’s because the Indoor Tanning Association (ITA), a group of salon owners and tanning-bed manufacturers and distributors, doesn’t seem to want you to know the truth. How else to explain why its Website contains myths about the harm indoor tanning can cause?

Those myths are the reason Cosmo

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