By KAREN VON HAHN


Saturday, August 10, 2002 – Print Edition, Page L3

The other week on Letterman, I watched the hilarious comedian Amy Sedaris tell Dave she is addicted to tanning. She's been doing it ever since she was a teenager, when she used to spend the entire summer in a tanning competition with her sister. It was like they were in training, smearing themselves with oil and flipping at regular intervals. They went to such lengths that they measured who was more tanned between the toes. She knows how bad it is for her, but she just loves looking so healthy. She called herself a tanorexic.

My name is Karen, and I too have a tanning problem. It all started with my father, who used to push my pallid, squinting teenage self into the sun to "get a little colour." Since the 1970s, he has been baking himself in his own mixture of baby oil and iodine (shake before using), and maintaining with regular trips to the Caribbean, sunlamps and those trifold reflectors lined in foil that you hold up against your face for a little extra broiling. Everybody always tells him he looks great. My friends, however, shocked that I still take the sun, are ready to stage a tanning intervention.

In my dermatologist's office, there is a framed cartoon on the wall that reads: "Before you start the perfect tan, take a good look at a raisin." In the past few years, dermatologists and beauty editors of women's magazines have hit that message hard. Not only have we been told that each year, more than a million new cases of skin cancer will be diagnosed, we have also been told that the sun is a big, red aging machine.

These days, new anti-aging moisturisers, makeup, even lip gloss all feature SPF. Sales of sunless tanners grew by 30 per cent last year: The options, from do-it-yourself creams and gels to professional mist-on, full-body sprays and even airbrush applications, have never been so numerous. And yet, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, on an average day, more than a million people will visit the tanning salon, despite recent evidence published by the National Cancer Institute that people who use tanning devices were between 1.5 and 2.5 times more likely to contract skin cancer. We all know that a tanned glow achieved through exposure to UV rays only looks healthier. Yet, in a recent AAD survey, 84.5 per cent of people under 25 polled at the start of this summer's tanning season said they look better tanned, up from 61 per cent in 1996.

Rita Fiorucci, a freelance fashion stylist based in Toronto, has been visiting a tanning salon once a week for the past six years. "The main reason I tan is that I tend to have dark circles, and I don't like to wear makeup," says Fiorucci. "I look a lot healthier and more rested with a tan."

"Once you start tanning, it's like an addiction," says Lois of Toronto's Sun Gods, a busy Toronto tanning salon, where 60-70 per cent of the clients come in at least once a week. "Girls come in here because they want to look all bronze-y, and toned, like J. Lo."

Fiorucci, a Sun Gods regular, agrees. "All the celebrities have great looking tans. It started about two years ago with all those golden Brazilian models, like Gisele, who were tan from head to toe."

Pale, bloodless Nicole Kidman looked washed out at the Oscars. Lily-white Kate Moss, even pregnant, looks like she just got out of rehab. But Britney and Christina Aguilera are always tanned, from their nut-brown bellies to the roots of their bleached blond hair. The cover of Sheryl Crow's new CD, Soak up the Sun, shows the 40something star as tanned as a Malibu surfer. Even the formerly geisha-pale Madonna is starting to look a little more toasty. "A tan hides all your flaws," explains Sun Gods' L. "It's like wearing black -- you look skinnier."

Laura Keogh, a Toronto beauty journalist, understands. "You feel like you look healthier, like you have a glow with a tan," says Keogh. "It has all those associations with a lifestyle where you're jetting off somewhere fabulous instead of sitting at a desk all day. A tan is like a sign of wealth and leisure."

Yet she would never support a tanning addiction. "People who tan are just stupid," says Keogh. "It's just irresponsible in this day and age. You wouldn't go and set your hair on fire, so why would you sit on a tanning bed?"

The remedy Keogh prescribes is to try out one of the four dozen new formulations of tans-in-a-can sitting in her office. "Armani himself tested his new bronzer, which is tinted exactly to match the sun he gets on his island in Pantelleria," Keogh enthuses. Fantasies of Italian isles aside, I know, like every true addict, that these salves are mere methadone, designed only to suppress my craving. Unlike the real, bad-to-the-bone, UV thing, they will never get me high.