‘It stings to put my hand under the tap': Former sunbed user warns of dangers after 12 years of tanning
A woman who used sunbeds three times a week for 12 years has warned others after suffering long-term skin damage.
'I could hardly even put my hands under the tap because it was stinging so much,' Karrieann McDonnell told Good Morning Britain on Friday (April 11).
'I regret having used it so much,' she said, revealing she had to have 18 moles removed.
A 2023 Melanoma Focus survey found 43 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds in the UK use sunbeds.
Just one session can raise the risk of skin cancer by up to 67 per cent, says the Irish Cancer Society.
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Atomic Kitten's Natasha Hamilton reveals skin cancer diagnosis
Atomic Kitten singer Natasha Hamilton has revealed she was diagnosed with skin cancer, saying she initially thought it was a 'mosquito bite'. The 42-year-old said she received the diagnosis last year after feeling an itch on her back following a holiday in Majorca while speaking on Good Morning Britain. She said: 'I'd been on holiday, and I wasn't actually in the sun a lot, because my baby was only about five months old, and I was breastfeeding. "Were you using sunbeds a lot?" Atomic Kitten singer Natasha Hamilton says she had a 'massive wake up call' after she was diagnosed with skin cancer. In 2024, Natasha found this suspicious mole on her back, which was subsequently diagnosed as what's called a 'basal-cell… — Good Morning Britain (@GMB) June 6, 2025 'And one afternoon I had her on my lap, and my back was in the sun and I burnt, and I don't know whether it was later that day or the next day, I had, like an itchy spot on my back, and I just thought it was a mosquito bite. 'Didn't think nothing, you don't get to look at your back very often, do you? It's tucked away. 'I felt it and went, 'oh, mosquito bite', it wasn't until maybe four weeks later, when I was at home and it was itching, and I was like, hang on a minute that seems a bit long for a mosquito bite. 'I asked my husband to have a look, and he went, 'oh, that's not a bite', and he took the picture, and when I looked at it, I went, 'okay, I think I know what that is'. 'Originally it had just been a dark freckle that I'd had on my back for many years, it wasn't raised, it wasn't a mole, it was just a freckle.' Hamilton went on to say she was later diagnosed with a 'basal-cell carcinoma', and added that she thought her use of sunbeds during her early days in the girl group in the late 1990s and early 2000s could have contributed. She added: 'People of my age will probably feel the same, or remember, if you were going on a night out you used a sunbed because you wanted that sunkissed look to make yourself feel good and give you a bit of confidence. 'If I was going to do something like Top Of The Pops or a big TV show, I'd want my look sunkissed, so we would go to the sunbeds. 'There was a sunbed shop based in the hotel that we stayed in all the time in London, and I'd use tan accelerators, and I can honestly say I don't think there was ever a time when I went on a sunbed that I didn't burn. 'Looking back now, because I'm type one skin anyway, I'm not supposed to be in such intense sun.' Hamilton's mother Maria was diagnosed with the same type of cancer after Hamilton noticed a mark on her face, and urged her to get it checked. She said her mother was initially told by doctors that the patch of skin was 'nothing', before she urged her to ask to be referred to a dermatologist a year later, who told her it was skin cancer 'straight away', before arranging for her to have them removed. Speaking in 2022, the singer, who has four children, said she had changed her lifestyle to lower the risk of increasing her chances of skin cancer following her mother's diagnosis. As part of Atomic Kitten alongside Kerry Katona and Liz McClarnon, before Katona was later replaced by Jenny Frost, Hamilton scored 13 UK top 10 singles and four UK top 10 albums – they are best known for the songs Whole Again and Eternal Flame.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
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'I used sunbeds from the age of 14 - now I'm 45 with incurable cancer'
A Co Down mum is highlighting the risks associated with sunbed use, after learning she had incurable cancer at the age of 45. Allison Coates, from Bangor, went to the doctor in 2017 with a mole on her back which had become itchy. She had a biopsy which found that she had melanoma. A couple of years later, Allison found a lump under her arm and it was discovered that the melanoma had returned and spread. And in another devastating blow, last Christmas she was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in her breast and has been told the cancer is incurable. READ MORE: Sun Awareness Week: The most common signs of skin cancer you need to watch out for READ MORE: Co Down woman's shock skin cancer diagnosis as experts issue 'mini heatwave' sunburn warning Speaking to Belfast Live, Allison said: "I started using sunbeds when I was around 14. Everyone seemed to be doing it. I used to go to a salon in Belfast every week in the summer and I even hired a sunbed to use in my house when I was 18. You got a base tan coming into the summer, and you thought you were thinking to get a tan before going on holidays, or before our sun arrived. "Any change to your skin colour is damage to your skin. I know that now. And it doesn't matter the skin type, swarthy, or pale, and change is damage. I stopped using them in my 20s and started using fake tan instead but I think the damage was already done. "I started to use fake tan, and became more aware of using suncream, but I actually thought by just putting on factor 15, I was OK. "Back in 2017, I was scratching my back, it was very itchy, and my husband took a look and said I should go to the doctor, which I did. My doctor was very good, and I was given a red flag referral. I had it cut out and it was found to be melanoma, but very early stages. "Then I had to go back and have a wider incision, and they felt at that stage that there was no further treatment needed because it was a millimetre out of what they'd normally start to treat. In 2019, I had a lump underneath my arm and it was found that melanoma had spread to my lymph. "I had an operation in October of last year, in the lead up to Christmas, and they weren't able to complete the surgery because the tumour is beside a very important artery. After that, there was a lot of swelling, and it was first thought that I had a seroma in my breast and it never really died down. "At Christmas time, I had it looked at and it had metastasised into my breast. I already had stage 4 metastatic melanoma, and it is treatment but not curable at the minute." New data released today by the charity Melanoma Focus has shown that 24% of people in Northern Ireland are using sunbeds at least once per year and 20% at least once per month. Allison has decided to share her journey, to raise awareness and to highlight the dangers associated with exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. "My advice to anyone using sunbeds, is to protect your body," Allison added. "You only have one body, and it is very precious. The skin is the biggest organ in your body, and the one you really need to look after. You need to be protecting yourself. My mummy had said to me 'Allison, I don't think you should be doing sunbeds', and I didn't listen to her, I thought I knew better." The national survey commissioned by Melanoma Focus revealed an alarming trend of sunbed use among young people across the UK. Despite the 2011 law banning sunbeds for under 18s, the charity's research has found that 34% of young people aged 16 to 17 are using them at least once per year and 23% at least once per month, putting themselves at serious risk of skin cancers including melanoma. In addition to sunbed use, the rise in popularity of tanning nasal sprays and injections has added another layer of concern. These artificial substances include melanotan-II to stimulate the pigment cells in the skin to produce more melanin, making skin look darker. The health risks associated with these tanning methods are increasingly coming to light and no forms of melanotan-II have been approved for human use in the UK. The Melanoma Focus survey found that 16% of NI adults (and 21% of UK 16-17 year olds) say they have used nasal sprays or injections intended to intensify their tan. For more information about sunbeds and melanoma prevention visit Melanoma Focus. For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our Be lifestyle newsletter for all the latest showbiz, fashion, beauty, family features and more.
Yahoo
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‘I refuse to be a victim': Anne Diamond on surviving her son's death, a brutal divorce and now cancer
Anne Diamond is passing judgment on the sofa on which she is sitting in a private room at Le Manoir, the Oxfordshire restaurant and hotel close to where she lives, run by her friend Raymond Blanc. 'It's got a nice firm cushion. But yours is too soft. You can't get out of it very easily,' she says. She knows a bit about sofas, of course. 'The thing to be aware of when you are sitting on one, particularly on TV, is your knees. It's all the camera can see. So when I did breakfast TV I would always wear skirts that covered them up.' I almost feel as though I am in the studio with Diamond, on an episode of Good Morning Britain in the 1980s as she says this. She has the same sparkly girl-next-door cheer at 70 that she had as an astonishingly young 26-year-old in 1979, when she breezed onto our screens and helped kickstart a golden age of daytime television. Immediately, her brightly coloured persona and effervescent warmth marked a break with the twin-set-and-pearls era of previous female television presenters such as Jan Leeming. Instead she was just like us, chatting to celebrities as though she'd known them forever, sharing photographs on air of her first pregnancy scan and eventually ditching the posh frocks for knitwear – albeit extraordinary 1980s creations with shoulder pads and sequins. 'I figured out for myself that wearing ostentatious designer clothes didn't work,' she says. 'People didn't like that very much. So I wore jumpers.' She's wearing one today, in fact, under a smart white suit. 'A lot of TV at the time was still pretty stuffy. But Good Morning Britain didn't have any airs and graces.' We've met the week after the programme with which she is indelibly associated – although by 1992 she and her co-presenter Nick Owen had jumped ship to front a new BBC show, Good Morning with Anne and Nick – has descended into turmoil. Headlines are screaming 'ITV bloodbath' as the channel announces 220 job cuts to its daytime schedule, including Good Morning Britain and Loose Women, on which Diamond appeared as a regular panellist between 2016 and 2018. What on earth is going wrong? 'It is failing to connect,' says Diamond in the sort of voice that implies this would never have happened on her watch. 'It's become terribly showbiz but in a lowest-common-denominator way. I find it difficult to watch because it's all Coronation Street stars.' Nor does she think it's newsy enough. 'It should have more of a news magazine format. Instead they've gone for the quick buck, which hasn't worked, because their viewing figures are much lower than they say. Both ITV and the BBC [whose flagship show is BBC Breakfast] have massaged the figures to make them look higher than they are.' Officially both programmes have around five million viewers. Either way, it's a far cry from Diamond's days, when Good Morning Britain would regularly attract an audience of around 14 million. Diamond realised the show had become a fixture of the cultural landscape when she met Paul McCartney at a function at the Dorchester. 'People had said a morning breakfast show would never work because people in Britain didn't watch TV at breakfast. But we quickly proved them wrong. At the Dorchester there was an enormous crowd around Paul and [his wife] Linda, but Paul turned around and said, 'Annie Diamond!' And I said, 'You know me?' And he said, 'Well, we have our cornflakes every morning and we watch breakfast television when you are on.' I found that stunning.' The key to Diamond's appeal was that she never pretended to be anyone other than who she was. Parts of Britain couldn't always keep up. When, in 1987, she announced she was pregnant with her then-boyfriend Mike Hollingsworth (they married in 1989 and divorced 10 years later) and that she planned to keep on working, the tabloid press erupted. 'It didn't occur to me that because I was pregnant I shouldn't be on screen,' she says. 'But the papers screamed that I was the most famous unmarried mother in Britain, which my mother didn't like, particularly. Some people clearly found it revolting that a pregnant woman should be presenting morning news.' Yet viewers were delighted, sending in well wishes and knitted booties by the bucket load. It was testament to how much Diamond had inserted herself into their lives. 'People almost felt as though they knew us. The trick with that sort of show is to create a family of presenters that people can become fond of. We also had a keep-fit spot, cartoons and lots of cookery – things to keep the whole family watching.' She thinks the steep decline in viewing figures on breakfast TV is not simply a case of audiences turning to streaming formats. 'It's just not family-orientated anymore. It's all about sex. It's like the Daily Mail [sidebar] of shame. And that's a mistake.' Is the format salvageable? 'I'm tempted to say yes, but I would make it more him-and-her on the sofa. I certainly don't know whether paying big money to big stars is the way to do it. I love the BBC, but the culture there at the moment is c--p; it's got an awful lot wrong with it. They allow some big stars to be on every programme and to dominate the channel, yet there is lots of young talent underneath that should be being brought through.' At this point, the name Gary Lineker inevitably pops up. The Match of the Day presenter left the BBC last weekend after two decades when the corporation finally lost patience over his use of social media to promote certain causes, including Palestine. 'If they had handled Lineker better and curbed his tweeting years ago, he'd still be on television,' says Diamond, who has great admiration for Lineker as a presenter. 'But it was the same with Huw Edwards. The BBC didn't handle it until it became such a crisis, the only way out was to get rid of him. That is bad management.' Does she think the corporation is scared of their big stars? 'If so, I can't think why. There's no excuse for why they've allowed them to become too big to handle. Instead, they let everything grow into a full-blown, front-page crisis.' She points to the cuts to regional broadcasting as a case in point. Diamond started out as a rookie journalist in regional newspapers on the south coast before joining BBC West in Bristol in the late 1970s. 'If you come up through regional news, it teaches you a respect for the people you're broadcasting to,' she points out. 'But I think there are a lot of broadcasters nowadays – producers, directors, executives, particularly, and presenters – who don't understand that there are people watching and listening. It's important you get your words right.' Does she agree with Mishal Husain, who, on departing Radio 4's Today programme in April, argued that 'personality-focused journalism doesn't have to be bombastic', a comment that was widely seen as a criticism of some of the changes to Today? 'Yes. You have presenters who have been allowed to get carried away with their own sense of importance.' Diamond, the middle of three girls, grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. Her father, who held a physics degree, was recruited by the Ministry of Defence at the outbreak of the Second World War to help develop radar at a hastily established base inside Malvern College – where the pupils were relocated to Eton and Harrow. It was there he met Diamond's mother, who worked as a secretary on the same project. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, she neither knew who she was working for nor, for many years afterwards, what her husband's role involved. Diamond only began to understand her father's importance – he had worked on miniaturising radar to fit individual aircraft – when several eminent scientists attended his funeral in 1997. After the war ended, bits of information about the radar project started dripping out. At the time, however, the level of secrecy was so high that even the residents of Malvern had no idea who these young men (and several women) in civilian clothing were. 'They were very suspicious,' says Diamond. 'They spat at the scientists [around 2,000 had come to Malvern] and sent them white feathers because they were convinced they must be conscientious objectors. It must have been terrible for my father, because all he wanted to do was fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. And yet he was ordered to become a designated worker instead.' Diamond made a documentary, Anne Diamond: VE Day and the Secret War, about her father for Viking TV, and is working on developing it into a series. She is keen for more stories about the scientists who worked at Malvern, and has set up an online campaign, Radar Families, in which she hopes to compile a social history of this forgotten chapter of Second World War history. Some of the stories are eye-popping – one includes an RAF test plane carrying cavity magnetrons (a high-powered vacuum tube used in early radar) crashing, and the onboard scientist having to clamber over the dead bodies of RAF pilots to get to the cavity magnetron before the emergency services arrived. I suggest to her that the subject would make an excellent film. 'Yes, well, it's probably not as exciting as a 'shoot them down' war movie. But those men were heroic. Malvern is the forgotten Bletchley Park. Without radar we wouldn't have won the war.' Beneath Diamond's shiny forthright sincerity there are nerves of steel. She has been through some dreadful times. In 1998 she separated from Hollingsworth after it was revealed he had had an affair; it later transpired he had been unfaithful throughout their marriage. Once again the red tops had a field day. 'There was a picture of me going into work at LBC, where I was hosting the radio breakfast show at the time, and they took a picture of me arriving at the studios at three in the morning,' she says. 'I looked very dishevelled, because you do at three in the morning. That made the front pages, with the headline 'Has Anne Diamond lost her sparkle'? The next day, my mother and sister, who was a hairdresser, arrived and sorted out my appearance. I remember my mother saying: 'Don't be weak, be strong. Weak is not a good look.'' And that helped? 'Yes, yes it did. But it was brutalising. You sit at the end of your bed and you feel, 'Cripes, who am I?' Because for so long I'd known where I was in life. I was a wife and mother.' But that heartache couldn't compare to what had happened seven years earlier. In 1991, she and Hollingsworth lost their third son, Sebastian, to sudden infant death syndrome (also known as cot death) at just four and a half months old. They already had two older sons, Oliver and James, and went on to have two more, Jake and Connor. Thirty years on, Diamond's grief remains raw. 'You don't get over the loss. By the time they are four and a half months, you've built the rest of their lives in your mind. I knew he was going to be a rugby player because he had that sort of physique. He was such a part of the family.' The attitude from the medical establishment at the time only intensified her grief. It was, at best, indifferent; at worst, misogynistic. '[Sebastian's death] was dismissed as a gynaecological problem. The attitude was very much 'Motherhood is a gynaecological issue, and if you lose babies, you lose babies. You simply have to cheer up and have another one.' But to me, it was the biggest tragedy of my life, and the idea that I just had to accept it was shocking.' So she refused to do so. She badgered away at the pathologist and the coroner for information, to no avail. 'I was just angry. I was angry at Sebastian for not crying out. And I was angry at the people who came to take his body away. It was three days before they did the post-mortem. Any trace of anything useful to know would have been lost by then.' Yet the Department of Health already knew at that point that putting children to sleep on their backs dramatically reduced the risk of cot death. A research project in New Zealand had been launched, encouraging all parents to put their children to sleep on their backs, and the government had agreed to allow a group of newborn babies in Bristol to be used as a control group. On discovering this, Diamond was consumed by a fury that has barely abated. 'I was incensed. Terribly hurt. I still think that if I'd been told [the advice from New Zealand], Sebastian would be alive today.' She persuaded a group of experts to meet the then-health minister, Virginia Bottomley ('the health secretary William Waldegrave never bothered to see me') and convinced Bottomley that they needed a television campaign. Initially, she had to battle just to get Bottomley to listen. 'I later gathered from the medical experts that, when they talked to the health minister without me present, she expressed her doubts about my veracity because I was a bereaved mother and just a TV presenter.' The resulting campaign, Back to Sleep, remains the most successful health campaign in television history, reducing cot deaths from 2,500 a year to around 300. In 2023, Diamond was awarded an OBE for services to public health. She becomes teary, and I feel a lump in my throat too. 'Going to the palace was wonderful. To hold a medal and think, 'That's for Sebastian.' I'm very proud of him.' The day after Sebastian's funeral, The Sun published a photograph of Diamond and Hollingsworth carrying his coffin. In 2011, Diamond cited this as evidence of excessive press intrusion during the Leveson Inquiry, accusing Rupert Murdoch of running a campaign against her after she had challenged him in the 1980s over his papers' disregard for the private lives of celebrities. She also told the inquiry that The Sun had offered her nanny £30,000 for a story and had infiltrated the hospital shortly after she gave birth to Oliver by impersonating a doctor. Today, she is a bit more sanguine about the impact of all this. 'I had fame when fame was very difficult to handle, and you had to be prepared that every single thing you did made a bloody picture in the papers. You knew you were always being scrutinised every moment of your life and that reporters were going through your rubbish. So I am fanatical about shredding everything.'But I know what sort of stress constantly being in court does to you, and what it means to become obsessed with how unfair the press is being,' she continues. 'That's why I worry about Prince Harry [Diamond knew his mother, Princess Diana, well during the 1990s]. I worry about the fact that he is obsessed with getting justice in a world in which maybe you can't. And actually, the best thing you can do is just get very good security guards and live behind a high fence if that's what you can afford.' She is, I suggest, a rare voice of support for Harry. She agrees the British public have lost sympathy for him. 'He needs his mum, but then, she might have become obsessed as well. He needs someone to say, 'Enjoy your best life'. The trouble is he hasn't got anything else to think about or do.' Diamond never had that luxury, for which she is grateful. She had four children to bring up, a career to manage. Thanks to the influence of her 'very pragmatic' mother, who sounds tremendous, she has always simply got on with things. In 2023 she announced she had undergone a double mastectomy, after being diagnosed with breast cancer – she is now cancer free. 'I was never scared. And I knew it was treatable. I just thought, 'Right, lop the breast off, if that's what you have to do. Just get rid of it.' You have to accept that your body is a bit like an old car, and that it needs a lot of work and you have to look after it.' It's because of her health that she doesn't want another mainstream presenting job. She currently presents the breakfast show on GB News at the weekend, 'which is just right'. She dislikes some of the critical conversations around GB News. 'Terms such as 'woke' and 'far-Right' are becoming almost meaningless,' she says. 'To call somebody far-Right just because they have a worry about immigration is not fair, because it's a simple human worry. It's all too easy to label people.' She is chuffed the show has been once again nominated for the Television and Radio Industries Club best news show, having won it twice before. 'That must annoy [traditional broadcasters].' Diamond never dated after splitting with Hollingsworth. 'It put me off dating forever. Honestly, I've been there and done that. I've never been interested, or never allowed myself to be interested. But I'm quite happy where I am. I defend the right of people to live like that and to think, 'Actually, I don't need a man.' Throughout my life I've survived because I've refused to think of myself as a victim.' Her resilience is humbling. She is quite the most astonishing person, a born survivor. 'I'm the oldest presenter on GB News. I'm very lucky to be still on air. People keep saying to me, 'Why don't you retire?' I know I should, but at the moment, I've got it good.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
