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To get the word out to kids at an early age, the EPA has shipped free SunWise kits to more than 13,500 elementary and middle schools. Arizona last year started requiring its public schools to participate in the program, which explains UV risks and emphasizes the use of sunscreen. But to reach teens and pierce their aura of invincibility, dermatologists are getting a lot more graphic. Some visit schools to display photographs of people with seemingly normal complexions alongside pictures filtered to reveal how freakishly mottled their skin really is from UV damage. Others show close-ups of oozing moles.
But many public-health advocates acknowledge that no message from doctors is as powerful as one from an appealing spokesperson who can compete with the gorgeously bronze Hilton and Simpson. Brittany Lietz, 21, may be a candidate. Slim, blond and incredibly frank, the nursing student was crowned Miss Maryland last month and will compete in the Miss America pageant in January, with skin-cancer awareness as her platform issue. She has already spoken dozens of times to kids about how she was a hard-core tanning-bed user--baking three or four times a week for 25 minutes a session--until she learned that the nickel-size mole on her back was a potentially life-threatening melanoma. Lietz says she gets the rapt attention of young audiences when she shows them some of her 27 surgical scars, including an 8-in. track on her back. "They really do have a look of shock on their faces," she says. "I want to scare them," she adds, "because nobody else is."
Lietz, along with dermatologists everywhere, is trying to steer teens away from tanning beds and the sun and get them to use sunless tanning lotions instead. The beauty queen tells high-schoolers how she tried some 30 different lotions before she found one that didn't look too orange or streaky. But it's a tough sell. Hendershot concedes that everyone "oohed" and "aahed" when one local girl got a fancy spray-on tan. "Personally, I wouldn't do it," she says. "I don't know why." And that's the inexplicable resistance that dermatologists are hoping will fade away.