COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Just stick to baking cookies

Used to be cool. Now it’s not. There was a time, not long ago, when having a golden tan was just about as hot as cool could be. Now?

Apparently it is the most dangerous thing a person can do. Apparently your body and mind need a certain amount of sunlight, but baking in the stuff is asking for trouble, to say nothing of skin cancer. Ideally you should wear a huge floppy hat and use sunscreen at all times, preferably SPF 120 or higher. This all came clear to me the other day while I was driving along and noticed how many tanning salons there are in our corner of the universe, which is a lot, which tells me people are taking all the warnings about how the sun and your skin are not friends seriously. I’ve never spent much time slathering and baking, but the basic human drive for a George Hamilton-quality tan seems to be as strong as ever, dire warnings aside.

Always fascinated by things I know nothing about, which is virtually everything, I decided to find out what goes on inside your average tanning salon now that there are at least two of them on every block.

Basically, you have two choices. You can get baked or sprayed. If you prefer baking, you lie on something called a tanning bed, which looks like a rectangular waffle iron, both halves lined with UV light tubes.

You stretch out on a Plexiglas ledge, the top half of the waffle iron is lowered, and the light tubes do their work while you lie there and think pleasant thoughts about a deserted beach in the Cayman Islands or curse quietly when you realize you forgot to drop off the dry cleaning, part of which you need tomorrow but now it’s too late. That’s a lot of thinking, but then again you have a lot of time to fill.

The tanning salon folks claim tanning beds are much safer than the sun, especially the new-generation ultraviolet lights (ultraviolet radiation is what does the tan thing), which apparently emit a much more benign UV light than the original tanning beds.

The skin doctors, also called dermatologists, are less than impressed. As far they are concerned, “suntan” is a euphemism for skin damage, and “sunburn” is a euphemism for severe skin damage. However you get it, you got it, and someday, you’ll regret it.

I am profoundly unqualified, as always, to address the safety issue, but I must say I have noticed one thing. Something must have happened in the tanning salon biz, because when they first appeared some years ago, you could tell a tanning booth tan from 1,000 yards, at sea, just after sunset.

People who got one looked, well … orange. And we’re not talking orange like a slight tint from drinking too much carrot juice. We’re talking Halloween/Syracuse University/traffic cone orange. If they had walked around wearing a sandwich board that said “Got It in a Tanning Booth,” no one would have read it.

Speaking of faux tan dead giveaways, the people who know what “trading stamps” means will recall the very first version of all this, the dreaded sunlamp, which appeared in the 1950s. Also a UV lamp, it looked like any other floodlight, mounted on a little stand, which you sat in front of wearing those geeky little rubber goggles. Unlike the orange people, these things turned you hot pink. The best you could hope for was looking like you just got back from the arctic with a bad windburn.

Very attractive.

Anyway, the second option, which seems to be the hot number right now, is to get sprayed, which eliminates those pesky ultraviolet rays entirely. Here you have two choices — booth or airbrush.

The booth is like your own little drive-through car wash, only you don’t drive through — you stand there with your arms up like you’re being robbed while a thousand little nozzles spray you with magic tanning potion. Your length of time as the spray-ee determines how stunning and white hot you’re going to look, although it takes a few hours to achieve full effect.

The second spray option is the gold standard of golden tans — the airbrush tan — which is exactly what it sounds like. A certified tanologist spritzes you ever so carefully with an airbrush gun. This is supposed to be the most even and realistic-looking tan, which considering the orange and the pink people from the old days, is very important I think. I don’t care if you are an Angelina Jolie look-alike, orange or hot pink is not a good look.

And that is all I know, such as it is. Make your own decision; your body is a temple. Whether you bake it or spray it is totally up to you. Above all, stay away from sunlight of any kind. It just isn’t natural.

I gotta go.