[JapanUrbanLegend] tanning

 

In the late 1990s, during the tanning craze among Japanese teenagers and young adults, a teenage girl frequently visited tanning salons to darken her skin. She disregarded the recommended limits and kept going from one salon to another until she achieved the desired skin color.

However, shortly after her tanning sessions, she began experiencing stomach pains, poor health, and a strange odor. Despite multiple attempts to wash and clean herself, her condition did not improve. Eventually, she visited a doctor who diagnosed her with "your internal organs are already half-cooked from the tanning salon's treatments."

The girl turned pale and asked if there was any treatment. The doctor replied, "It is impossible. Can you return a cooked steak to its original state?"

She continued to suffer and died a few weeks later. This story originated in the 1980s in the United States and was later popularized in Japan in the late 1990s. The legend is believed to stem from a vague fear of artificial heat treatments and misconceptions about devices like microwave ovens.

In reality, such incidents are impossible with simple tanning, and even with direct heat sources (e.g., heating pads) at 40-50°C, prolonged exposure can cause low-temperature burns, which are only likely to affect infants, the elderly, those with vascular conditions, or people extremely intoxicated. Most people would notice symptoms and take action before such extreme damage occurs.

Mythbusters' experiments have debunked this legend. Humans can only survive temperatures up to 42°C before experiencing fatal damage and would notice problems well before reaching such a point. Therefore, it is not possible to "cook" internal organs through tanning, and survival with such damage for weeks is implausible.