The Food and Drug Administration is expected to initiate a debate on how to toughen warnings that the use sunlamps results in a cancer risk, while also hinting that sunburns are dangerous.

However, there is a widening scientific consensus that there's no such thing as a safe tan, either.

"It seemed somewhat of a myth that I was putting myself at risk", says Donnar, of Bruceville Ind., who found the melanoma before it spread.

An analysis based on numerous studies concluded that the risk of melanoma jumps by 75 percent in people who used tanning beds in their teens and 20s.

The World Health Organization's cancer division last summer pegged tanning beds as definitive cancer-causers, which emit ultraviolet radiation both by the beds and sun.

FDA claims that the tanning beds regulated as "Class I devices" do bear warnings about the cancer risk, but reveal that those are so small that it is hardly visible to the customer’s especially young people.

Hence it made the FDA‘s scientific advisers to convene a public hearing in March with an aim to explore stricter tanning bed regulation, both stiffer warnings and reclassifying them to allow other steps.

The industry welcomes some change in warning labels, Humiston says, so as to ensure customers understand the pros and cons of the whole process, so there's no chance they could be overexposed, no chance they could get sunburn.