An international study which adds to growing evidence surrounding the cancer-causing risks of indoor tanning has prompted calls to tax the industry and increase health warnings to consumers.
The research comes as NSW pushes ahead with legislation to ban tanning salons by 2014, while Queensland is considering a similar move.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal this week, found that people who used tanning beds were more likely to develop two types of non-melanoma skin cancer, basal and squamous cell carcinoma.
The findings follow a study in the same journal in July that showed the risk of melanoma from sunbed use was 20 per cent, rising to 87 per cent if people were exposed before the age of 35.
Experts from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research said the two studies provided more convincing evidence that exposure to artificial ultraviolet radiation can cause skin cancers.
Senior researcher Catherine Olsen and Adele Green, the head of the cancer and population studies group at the university, said sunbeds were now banned in Brazil.
Meanwhile, people under the age of 18 were banned from using solariums in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the UK, and parts of Australia, Canada and the US.
These laws should be linked to warnings by health professionals and educators about the risks of indoor tanning, the researchers wrote in an editorial in the same edition of the journal.
"Young people in particular should be made aware that the use of sunbeds for short-term cosmetic tanning carries the long-term price of an increased risk of skin cancer," they said.
US expert Simon Williams of Chicago's Northwestern University suggested the European Union should follow the US and introduce a tax on indoor tanning services to acknowledge that like tobacco, tanning is a carcinogen.
Indoor tanning is considered a class I carcinogen by the World Health Organisation.
The current study, led by Professor Eleni Linos at the University of California San Francisco, reviewed 12 studies including more than 9,000 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer.
Using indoor tanning increased the risk of developing squamous cell carcinoma by 67 per cent and basal cell carcinoma by 29 per cent, compared to never using solariums.
The researchers estimated tanning accounted for 3.7 per cent of basal cell carcinoma and 8.2 per cent of squamous cell carcinoma cases in the US alone.
Exposure to indoor tanning before the age of 25 increased the risk of developing basal cell carcinoma.
The authors said although non-melanoma cancer is rarely not lethal, it carries a considerable disease burden.