According to recent reports, the UV lamps used by certain nail salons to dry and cure your nail polish are as hazardous as tanning beds. The damage might not be visible immediately, but it should be seen over the process of multiple manicures. Researchers tested 17 different lamps from different nail salons and came to the conclusion that it could take anything between 8 – 208 visits (depending on the machine) to damage your skin cells and make them susceptible to cancer.

According to Dr. Lyndsay Shipp from the Georgia Regents University, patients should be ok unless they are going for multiple visits in a month. However, you would still be advised to take caution before using those UV lamps again. After all, cancer risks were one of the main reasons tanning beds went out of fashion almost immediately.

The American Cancer Society believes that most skin cancers ultimately originate from exposure to UV radiation. Natural sunlight might be the biggest source of UV radiation, but UV lamps and tanning booths don’t help your cause either.

According to reports, a number of studies have been conducted in the past with regards to polish drying UV lamps, but most of those studies stated that the lamps were not powerful enough to cause damage. However, Shipp believes that those studies had certain flaws. Shipp stated that the previous studies did not measure the nail lamps as as the UV radiation that they’re exposed to.

UV-A is just one of the three types of UV rays that affect the skin. UV-A rays lead to wrinkles on the skin and they also break the DNA strands within your skin cells, which ultimately leads to cancer. The new study tested these lamps at different power levels, but on a general basis, lamps with higher wattages had higher levels of UV-A radiation. The researchers then calculated how much UV-A radiation would be enough to damage your DNA. The results showed that about 11 uses of the device would be enough to raise a cancer risk. Therefore, the total exposure time ranged within 8 – 28 minutes, depending on the type of machine used.

The risk might be low, but experts endorsed the idea of wearing some sunscreen to protect your hands from UV damage. According to Dr. Alina Markova (not connected with the study), DNA damage doesn’t necessarily mean that a person will end up developing cancer. Markova works for the Boston University Department of Dermatology and she has studied the UV rays  emitted by these salon lamps. She said that the UV nail lamps might still be relatively safe, but the UV tanning beds are terribly dangerous.

In fact, organizations such as the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Dermatology have come down hard on indoor tanning. In the year 2009, the World Health Organization labeled tanning devices as a high level carcinogen. This places them in the same range of tobacco in terms of a health threat.

Shipp believed that it would be unfair to say that there is anything which is perfectly safe. She also stated that the studies might not be inconclusive, but the results somewhat ascertain that nail salon lamps seem to be relatively safe.