‘One on every corner, like 7-11’: Aussies flout rules for ‘sexy’ quest

Australians are secretly flouting bans that are in place across the country, revealing the “underground” businesses that are helping them do it.

“If you see a tanned bitch on the streets of Sydney during winter, you can guarantee she’s using an illegal solarium,” says Trina*, a cosmetic injectables nurse.

“She definitely ain’t goin’ to Bali every two weeks.”

Trina’s looking golden brown herself, despite the months of chill.

“I used the sunbed a few weeks ago,” she says, tilting her face to the ceiling and basking in an imagined glow.

Commercial solarium businesses were banned across Australia (minus the Northern Territory) in 2015 and studies show people who use sunbeds are 20 per cent more likely to get skin cancer (a risk that jumps to 59 per cent if used before the age of 35).

“I’m going again tonight,” Trina, 34, declares. “Solariums are everywhere. They banned ‘em but they just went underground. There’s one on every corner, like 7-11.”

Trina’s also looking thinner. Maybe it’s just the bronzed glow that’s slimming her silhouette? Nah. It’s the unapproved weight loss drug she recently started self-injecting. She gets it from a dodgy pharmacist “with good connections” who sources it on the internet, even though it hasn’t been registered with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and is still being investigated in clinical trials overseas.

“I’ve lost 14 kilos,” she says, proud of the results she has achieved as an unofficial guinea pig.

Aussies are bending the rules to get fantasy bodies.

Before that, Trina was taking the diabetes medication that became mainstream thanks to Hollywood celebrities like Amy Schumer and Oprah using it for its slimming side effects.

She was buying it online for $250 from a stranger – “before it was approved” and without the required doctor prescription, something the TGA warns against.

The medication was making her feel sick, she says.

Trina is one of many Aussies willing to flout the rules and put their health on the line in order to look … well, in her words, “hot”.

“Perceived beauty,” says psychology associate professor at Monash University Gemma Sharp, labelling the sexy quest these Aussies are on as a potential illusion. “It goes to show that the perception of beauty is seemingly prioritised higher than health and legalities in some instances.”

The Australian Border Force (ABF) tells news.com.au it detects and seizes “large volumes” of illegally imported performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) and other items such as weight loss drugs and injectables. There were 11,016 detections of PIEDs at the border last year, up 1621 from 2022. As of July, 6387 have already been detected this year.

But that’s just the stuff that gets caught. Illegal online purchases of steroids and injectables are seemingly flourishing, along with the “Barbie drug” — a tanning enhancer that comes in injectable form as well as a nasal spray.

“I thought they were legal now because everyone’s doing it,” Melbourne fitfluencer Jessika* says of the tanning aids.

Tanning injections and nasal sprays supercharge a tan when exposed to the sun – and often have worrying side effects.

She regularly documents her “wellness journey” on Instagram – posting videos of herself pumping iron at the gym along with photos of her salmon and broccoli dinners.

“I’ve spent a decade living a healthy lifestyle,” the 44-year-old says.

And she has also spent the past five years using tanning injections, paying $50 to an online stranger for what’s supposed to be a vial of either Melanotan I or Melanotan II – synthetic peptides that trick the body into tanning rapidly with less time in the sun.

While Melanotan I is a prescription-only medicine that’s usually only used for the management of a rare incurable genetic disease, erythropoietic protoporphyria, Melanotan-II is not included on the TGA register and has not been assessed for quality and safety. But tan addicts don’t seem to care. The Barbie drug is booming on social media, especially since the substance became available in the form of a nasal spray.

One of Jessika’s mates recently began selling the products on Instagram. She asked Jessika to promote the venture to her 16,000 followers, despite it being illegal to advertise both Melanotan I or II to the general public, and illegal to supply them without a doctors’ prescription.

“So I did it, just to get a free nasal spray,” Jessika says of the #sponcon posts.

Medical organisations around the world warn the sprays can lead to horrific physical deformities and cause kidney failure, shortness of breath and dizziness along with prolonged and painful erections. They can also be life-threatening.

University of New South Wales associate professor of dermatology Dr Deshan Sebaratnam says there is a theoretical risk these tanning aids can increase pigment cell activity and turn them into cancers.

“We’re the melanoma capital of the world. We know Melanotan increases pigment cell activity and causes cells to darken into moles and so there’s a potential risk it could cause moles to turn into melanoma.”

It’s not the risk of cancer or legal punishment that made Jessika stop using the nasal sprays. She says she went back to the injections because they gave her a deeper tan. She doesn’t seem fazed that they have led to her experiencing nausea, “hot flashes” and “patchy lips”.

Dr Sebaratnam says he has seen negative results of the Barbie drug.

“I’ve seen caucasian people who are taking the injections and they look like the colour of Coca-Cola,” he says.

Associate professor Gemma Sharp, who leads the Body Image & Eating Disorders Research Program in the Department of Neuroscience at Monash University, says people “often associate tans with healthiness and also perceive it to make them look slimmer”.

That’s the case for Melbourne admin assistant Monique*, 52, who started doing the tanning nasal sprays after an advertisement for them glided through her Instagram timeline. She paid almost a thousand dollars for a batch of sprays that would last the whole summer and fantasised looking like “a glowing specimen of a human”.

“When you get a tan you look slimmer and you look healthier and you don’t need as much makeup,” she reasons.

When the sprays arrived, she followed the instructions: one shot up each nostril, three times a day.

By the end of the week, her dreams were dashed, her skin was damaged – and the nasal sprays were thrown in the trash.

“Within a couple of days, all of a sudden all the moles and freckles on my body got really dark — and I was getting almost black spots and new ones popped up seemingly overnight,” she recalls.

Some Aussies are determined to get beach bronzed.

“You wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and suddenly have black moles on your chest. Then a few days after that I started getting really bad headaches. I didn’t know what to put it down to. But they just wouldn’t go away – and they got worse and worse. They were migraines. And the only thing I’d done different is these nasal sprays. So I stopped taking it and, within a day, they were gone.”

Monique didn’t go to the doctor or complain to the Instagram business or report the sprays to authorities because she knew the product was banned and unapproved by the TGA.

“It was terrible,” she says of her experience.

A spokesperson from the TGA tells news.com.au it urges consumers to “exercise extreme caution when purchasing medicines from unknown websites, social media or other digital platforms” and not to use “prescription medications offered or issued without a prescription from a health practitioner”.

It’s not just a bronzed complexion people are willing to bend the rules for. Some are experimenting with DIY face filler, often to catastrophic results.

Medispa owner Kayden* says clients with “massive infections” have presented to the clinic after botching their own faces while attempting to plump their lips and smooth wrinkles with injectable chemicals purchased online.

“It’s inflamed and extremely swollen,” he says of the dodgy results. “We had one client who came in thinking his jaw was just uneven (after DIY filler) but it was an infection. We sent him to the hospital. Those cases need medical intervention.”

Kayden warns: “If you come across something that sounds too good to be true, it usually is.”

But that didn’t stop him from trying online tanning injections himself. Kayden says he achieved the glow he wanted. Still, not everyone’s as lucky.

Aiden is a Sydney personal trainer who developed dark splotches after using the jabs he’d bought online for $60.

“I had to stop it after a while because I got dark spots on my face and I had to go to a skincare place to get laser to remove it but, as soon as I went in the sun, they’d come back,” he says.

“My skincare lady said I’m an idiot.”

Some Aussies are convinced that using solariums is a healthier option despite studies showing people who use sunbeds are 20 per cent more likely to get skin cancer.

Prof Sharp says people often see these treatments as “a ticket to improving their life situation”. And it seems everyone draws the line in different places.

“It’s very individual. What one person thinks is acceptable may not be acceptable to another,” she says.

When Aiden’s told about Trina’s unapproved weight loss injections, he gasps.

“I think that’s crazy to inject something in your body when you don’t know what it is,” he says.

Huh … Like tanning injections bought on the internet?

Aiden quickly retracts his judgement.

Meanwhile, Trina, who was recently fired from her beauty salon job, thinks it’s crazy to mess with the tanning injections and nasal sprays.

“I’d never do ‘em,” she declares. “I have mates that did and they look like f**kin’ Oompa Loompas – pumpkin orange. They look f**kin’ weird. That’s where I draw the line.”

She’ll be sticking with her illegal solarium, thank-you-very-much. The sunbed she uses is tucked out the back of an otherwise legitimate beauty salon in the suburbs. She pays $40 for 30 minutes and the beautician behind the counter even supplies her with a cream to “accelerate” the tan. Then, at the till, the sales assistant processes the treatment as a “spray tan”.

Dark splotching after sun exposure is a common side effect of tanning injections and nasal sprays.

While most state governments across Australia banned commercial solarium businesses more than nine years ago, personal sunbeds are still allowed to be purchased for at-home use and it’s not an offence for a person to use an illegal solarium. It’s this loophole that seems to have allowed a black market to flourish in the back rooms of some beauty parlours. It has also seen a rise in amateur tanning entrepreneurs, illegally advertising their personal sunbeds on social media and allowing tan seekers to pay cash in hand for use.

So far this year in Victoria there have been 34 matters investigated with a dozen seized tanning units undergoing the statutory processes to be forfeited and recycled by the regulatory department. One individual was prosecuted in April and fined $15,000 with conviction after an investigation uncovered five tanning units at a property.

In New South Wales, the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) has received 32 reports of alleged illegal solaria but hasn’t seized any sunbeds or commenced any prosecutions in relation to illegal solariums.

“We undertake a range of regulatory and investigative actions and compliance campaigns to deter unlawful operators,” an EPA spokesperson says of the inspections, advisory letters, formal warnings and penalty notices that form part of the process.

Posts advertising casual sunbed hire continue to be easily found on Facebook and Instagram. One account spotted by news.com.au even offers refer-a-friend discounts.

One Sydney beautician tells news.com.au her sunbed is booked up until 9pm most nights with regular clients who pay $40 for thirty-minute sessions.

She advertises openly on social media and doesn’t seem to fear potential fines that range between $22,000 for individuals and $44,000 for businesses in NSW that get busted.

Trina, the solarium addict and weight loss guinea pig, doesn’t see what the fuss is about.

“What? The government banned solariums and now all of us have to be punished?” she says.

Before the national ban, it was estimated that each year in Australia, 281 melanoma cases, 43 melanoma-related deaths and 2572 new cases of squamous cell carcinoma were directly related to solarium use, at a cost to the public health system of around $3 million, Cancer Council reports.

“When you expose yourself to ultraviolet radiation, it causes your melanocytes to produce more pigment as a stress response,” says Dr Sebaratnam. “Ultraviolet radiation causes mutations in your DNA which definitely leads to things like skin cancer.”

Prof Sharp says people often trick themselves into thinking these banned treatments are healthy.

“The fact they can be taken as a nasal spray or injection kind of medicalises it – so people think it’s like an antihistamine or antibiotic,” she says. “ … It makes it seem more legitimate rather than a beauty enhancement.”

For Melbourne fitfluencer Jessika, she refuses to believe the facts.

“They mean I don’t have to lie in the sun for as long as I used to, so they’re healthier,” she says, ignoring her nausea and patchy lips as well as the warnings of potential melanoma.

On her Instagram, there’s a photo that shows her dressed in a skimpy leopard print outfit. With her orange skin, she looks like a really athletic traffic cone.

How does she feel about her appearance?

“You are the creator of your own life,” she says. “ … And you can literally have anything you want.”

Facebook: @hellojamesweir

*Names changed

Originally published as ‘One on every corner, like 7-11’: Aussies flout rules for ‘sexy’ quest