Everyone likes being tan. Tan means summer and the beach and pools and fun. Tan is not winter and snow and skiing. Pale is for all of those things.

Then why, if it isn’t summer, do students at Ludlow High School tan? Mostly, it’s because they feel like they need to be tan in order to look good. They spend hundreds of dollars a year and take the risk of getting skin cancer or turning an odd hue of orange.

One in five Americans will develop skin cancer in the course of a lifetime. Over the past three decades, more people have had skin cancer than all other cancers combined. About 90 percent of melanoma skin cancers are associated with exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation from mostly tanning beds but also just from the sun.

The Skin Cancer Foundation provides many statistics on melanoma. An estimated 76,250 new cases of invasive melanoma will be diagnosed in the US in 2012, with 9,180 estimated to result in death. One in 50 men and women will be diagnosed with melanoma of the skin during their lifetime. Survivors of melanoma are about nine times as likely as the general population to develop a new melanoma.

Junior Patrick Morias is a regular at Wilbraham Tanning. He said he goes tanning to “look like a good- looking kid,” and that he “doesn’t worry about getting skin cancer, that doesn’t even go through his head.”

Juniors Madison Carr and Emily Woods also didn’t care about getting skin cancer. Carr says, “I just stopped tanning because it was too expensive.”

Just to add to that, tanning is really expensive. Besides the monthly package deals, you have to buy 60 dollar tanning lotion and after tanning lotion. Depending on how much you go tanning, this can last you less than a month.

“I went on Black Friday,” Morias says, “ I got a good deal, but the Pauly D lotion was still 57 dollars.”

Junior Jocelyn Minie, someone who doesn’t tan, says, “I think people who do it for, like, prom is okay. But people who do it almost every day- they just look really weird (sometimes looking orange).”

So being broke, having skin cancer and being orange. Sounds like a grand ‘ol time.

“When you tan, you think you look good which makes you more confident. You don’t think you look orange,” said Carr.

Let’s just embrace our inner pale-ness and carry on with our lives without looking weird and out of place for it being the middle of winter. Wait for summer, go to the beach, catch some rays that way. Just make sure you put on some spf before you go out.