How Does Tanning Benefit Your Health?
Skin tans are becoming increasingly popular and a darker, vibrant complexion is widely seen as fashionable. A skin tan represents much more than aesthetic, however. Its ability to provide protection from the sun and more importantly trigger the synthesis of vitamin-D means that a good suntan can have a range of health benefits.
What makes a tan healthy isn't so much the color of your complexion, but the process you used to get your skin that way in the first place. A darkened, melanin-rich skin can protect against sunburns, but the real benefit of suntan lay in its ability to trigger vitamin D production.
Vitamin D is an important chemical that has many associated health benefits. It is primarily well known for its ability to trigger calcium uptake in the small intestine. Sufficient levels of Vitamin D have for this reason been linked to good bone health, while low levels have been linked to the once-prominent nutritional disease, rickets and even arthritis. In fact, vitamin D has been linked to numerous benefits outside of bone health. Correlations are found between adequate vitamin D and healthy hair follicles and a bolstering of the immune system, the activation of which has a range of benefits itself. For this reason, it is recommended by many governments that people ensure they have adequate vitamin D, but while this can be provided by supplements, it is also produced naturally due to sun exposure.
When sunlight strikes the skin, the ultraviolet radiation activates a set of cells in the basal layer of the skin called melanocytes. These cells are responsible for the production of melanin, the pigment responsible for the darkening of complexion and the commonly-recognized suntan. This pigment is itself activated and darkened by the radiation. At the same time as this happens the UV stimulation of the skin triggers the synthesis of vitamin D, and so in addition to the tan providing protection against burns, it also brings with it all the associated benefits of the vitamin.