2) Take it slow to reach your "cosmetic objectives." Build up a tan by using the beds for short periods over a series of sessions.

3) Apply professional tanning lotions before and after your tan. These don’t protect against UV exposure, but they help with dryness.

4) Always wear eyewear. He tips his head back to demonstrate how one would never sunbathe on a beach with one’s eyes open. Nor should one do this while inside a 63-lamp iBed Swing Commercial Tanning Bed.

He sums it all up with two words: "Tan responsible."

I point to poster of a blond model relaxing on a white-sand beach, her skin like a moist Werther’s caramel. I ask Baker how long he thought it would take for me to look like that.

"Can you tan?" he says, surveying my ghostly pallor. He suggests I think about getting a spray-on instead.

It's this kind of diligence that Baker thinks is why people keep coming to Palm Beach Tan, even as the tanning industry as a whole has shrunk by more than a fifth over the past four years. It’s a period that's been marked by a federal tanning tax, a slew of state-level age restrictions, and an increasingly alarming series of public-health warnings about the dangers of UV exposure.

Even though tanning beds still make up the bulk of the indoor-tanning business, spray tanning is now the only part of the industry that's growing. While big, bronze empires like Palm Beach will probably weather the regulatory storm, hundreds of "mom and pop" tanning places around the country have shuttered.

"It's sad," he says. "Tanning is a fun thing. In our industry, we all know each other, and we just don't want to hear things like that."

Baker looks like a fit soccer dad in his khakis and gingham shirt embroidered with a Palm Beach logo. He's a company man, having worked his way up from a part-time sales associate job in Texas to his current role, in which he oversees 97 stores on the East Coast.

His face is the color of a newborn fawn, a result of what he calls "cocktail tanning"—a combination of sunbed- and spray-tanning. I kept trying to tell myself that he, as well as the gingersnap-hued women behind the counter, would look just as good if they were their natural beige-white.

I asked Baker if he thought people would ever stop tanning entirely.

"No," he said. "Because I'm a beach person. Just going to Virginia Beach or Ocean City, there are people out there trying to get a tan."

And that's the next big challenge for health agencies. Despite how rapidly the warnings and taxes and regulations have beat back the sunbed industry, there’s still something a little glamorous about being tan.

* * *

According to one popular theory, tanning caught on by accident. In the early 20s, Vogue magazine ads were still peddling bleaching creams that claimed to "get rid of tan." Doctors in the early 1900s thought sun exposure caused nervousness and insanity. In his 1905 book The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, Dr. Chas Edwards Woodruff wrote, “The American girl is a bundle of nerves. She is a victim of too much light."