Blame Snooki! There’s a tanning crisis in New Jersey, with nearly a third of the state’s indoor-tanning teens saying they’d struggle to kick the habit, a study has found.
A Rutgers study found 66.1 percent of teen girls and 33.9 percent of teen boys in the state had been to a tanning salon in the past year.
Of them, 9.7 percent said it would be “very” difficult to stop, 13.1 percent said it would be “moderately” difficult and 8.7 percent said it would be “a little” difficult.
The study was based on interviews with 1,850 high-schoolers in 2012, a year before a state law banned minors from tanning beds.
Tanning and Jersey became synonymous thanks to MTV’s “Jersey Shore” and its bronzed stars, including Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi.
Predictably, white teens — at a 64.3 percent rate — were more likely to have hit the tanning salon in the past year. Still, 10.1 percent of black teens and 21.2 percent of Hispanic teens reported going.
The study, in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, warned that indoor tanning raises melanoma risk by 85 percent among children.