Tanning Mom Action Figure Pokes Fun at Tanorexia
A new action figure has been developed after the "tanning mom" who in real life, is named Patricia Krentcil.
Krentcil was arrested when her 5-year-old daughter's teacher called protective services after the girl arrived to school "badly burned." When asked where she had received the "rash" on her skin, the girl replied that she "went tanning with mommy."
"I would never in my life let my daughter, especially at that age, go into a tanning booth," Krentcil told Good Morning America.
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Patricia Krentcil said that taking her daughter to the tanning salon was like taking her shopping, suggesting that she treated the tanning trips as errands.
"It's like taking your daughter to go food shopping," she told NBC 4 New York at her Nutley, N.J. home after being released on $25,000 bail. "There's tons of moms that bring their children in."
Krentcil believes that it is ok to expose her daughter to her tanning habit, so long as her daughter is not a part of it. She did not reveal who took watch of her daughter while she was in the booth.
"I tan, she doesn't tan," she continued. "I'm in the booth, she's in the room. That's all there is to it."
The company who has developed a new "Tanning Mom" doll following the news incident suggested that it was all in good humor.
"We thought it was a funny thing to do," Emile Vicale, president and founder of the Oxford, Connecticut-based website, told Mail Online.
The doll will sale for $29.95 and bears the description stating, "Get one for all your TANOREXIC friends," on the company website HeroBuilders.com which also has come to fame for its figures representing political personalities.
Some medical experts have suggested that tanning is an actual addiction, penning the term "tanorexic."
One study has even suggested that tanning can be addiction comparable to alcoholism or drug abuse. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered that individuals may become as dependent on tanning as they do on other addictive substances.
"Dermatologists often talk about people who seem 'addicted to the sun' -- people who know it's not good for them to be bronzed all the time, but don't seem to be able to stop tanning," UTMB professor Richard Wagner, senior author of the study, told Medical News Today.
