The first time 26-year-old Olivia used a sunbed, she was killing time during her gap year before starting her undergraduate degree at Cambridge University. She and her best friend, both 18 at the time, had plans to travel around India, and decided that they wanted to get a tan in preparation.
“We did no research whatsoever,” she tells me when we chat over the phone. “We just went to this place in Brighton that my friend’s mum owned. To be honest, I wasn’t nervous at all — I knew it was bad for you but I didn’t think it was any worse than going in the sun for a prolonged period of time.”
