The glamorisation of tanning on social media is like a "kick in the guts" for a Brisbane woman fighting advanced skin cancer and she says the narrative urgently needs to be flipped.
"Watching people glamorise a tan across social media is honestly a kick in the guts, when myself and so many others are fighting for our lives," advanced melanoma patient Gina Savage told AAP.
Ms Savage, 27, was diagnosed with melanoma seven years ago and it has since spread to other parts of her body.
Since her initial diagnosis, the Brisbane woman has been through four rounds of radiation treatment and has been on five systemic drugs, which failed.
The cancer has slowly made its way around her body, wreaking havoc, she said.
"For me, and many, many other people in my position, up to 50 per cent of advanced melanoma patients don't respond to current available treatments."
The narrative that tanning is chic needs to be flipped on its head, Ms Savage says.
Her comments come as social media giant TikTok makes a pledge to remove harmful pro-tanning content from its platform on the first day of summer.
The company will scrub content with the #sunburnchallenge hashtag from the platform and will to share links with information about tanning, summer and sunburn from the Melanoma Institute Australia.
The "Tanning - That's Cooked" campaign will be seen by every TikTok user between the ages of 20 and 39.
"I just think it's absolutely incredible and it's about time that it happened," Ms Savage said.
She said social media was the best way to get through to younger people with a message about prevention.
Users in the demographic do not respond to serious health messages but are more likely to engage with humour, TikTok general manager Lee Hunter said.
"The campaign is inviting TikTok creators to use humour and throw shade at tanning in their own authentic way, helping to spread the word and change the perception of tanning."
Melanoma Institute Australia CEO Matthew Browne said one person in Australia was diagnosed with melanoma every 30 minutes and it claimed more lives than the national road toll.
He said there was no safe way to get a tan, adding concepts like a "base tan" were similar to saying you could smoke your way out of lung cancer.
