Wish

I Wish I Hadn't Tanned

Shawna DiMattina winces when she recounts the full battery of skin sins she committed in her youth. "We called it 'building a base,'" says the mom of two from Westfield, New Jersey, of how she and her pals spent summers deepening their glow with dangerously low-SPF suntan lotions. 

There were other transgressions: visits to the tanning salon before prom in high school; a spring-break trip to the Bahamas in college when she was burned so badly, her skin blistered and oozed; weekend after summer weekend in her 20s spent at the beach, forgetting to reapply sunscreen; periodic returns to tanning beds before weddings and events to get some color. "I felt good when I was tan," Shawna admits. "I wasn't thinking about the future