Wiley Master has been many things in his life, besides the bearer of an unusual name.

The Clarion native has been an enlisted man in the Navy, an aviations electrician, a product consultant and a dot.com bubble riding co-founder of a communications optics company.

But what brought him back home to Pittsburgh for keeps is sunless tanning -- specifically, his decision to start the first tanning salon in the area to offer only sunless tanning.

But, Master explained, "It's not like I woke up one morning and decided, 'Hey, I want to go start a tanning salon.' "

It was a decision, he said, he'd come to after taking many things into consideration.

From the Navy, through business school in California, and on to life in the high-flying tech towns of northern California, Master always considered the Pittsburgh area home.

"I always thought if I can find something here locally in Pittsburgh, I can come back."

An opportunity at California-based FreeMarkets, a now defunct procurement software company, coincided with Master's decision to move back to Pennsylvania to care for his father. But Master soon found that, after so many years in high stress businesses, he wanted to open a calmer, service-oriented business of his own, without having to leave Pittsburgh.

"I mean, I spent the last 12 years of my life [in California] with a bunch of big brains trying to solve big brain problems. I just wanted to do something simple; sell people something that they want."

Which is where tanning came in. Tanning, Master found, is very popular in Western Pennsylvania.

"I always liken it to Britain. You only get 35 sunny days out of the year ... and, oh, by the way, if you work, the chances of you being able to take advantage of those days are slim to none."

The frequently gray skies of Western Pennsylvania, it seems, are a boon to tanning businesses.

"I'm surprised at the number of patients in Pittsburgh who own their own [tanning] beds," said Dr. Suvan Obagi, professor of dermatology and director of the UPMC cosmetic surgery and skin health center.

Master, who now lives in Seven Fields, also discovered something else about the tanning industry while researching the business.

"The No. 1 selling category in the regular [ultraviolet] tanning bed business is girls age 13 to 16," he said.

Obagi agreed. "You definitely see a lot of teenagers who want to tan for dances [and] prom," she said. "Because of all of that, we're seeing an amazing number of basal cell carcinoma in patients under 25."

Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer, affecting about 800,000 Americans every year, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation.

Because of his concern about "exposing children to potentially harmful devices," Master said he decided to go into the sunless tanning business, which uses spray-on tanning solutions rather than ultraviolet, or UV, tanning beds.

His salon, Steel Beach Tanning in the Fitness Factory gym on Castle Creek Drive in Seven Fields, opened in February.

Master said he picked the location because the gym already had certain amenities in place, such as the gym itself and its day care and shower facilities.

Sarah Cahall, a junior at Quaker Valley High School, switched to sunless tanning at Steel Beach after using traditional UV tanning beds to get her tans.

Because of the health risks, "my mom didn't want me tanning at all," she said.

After she got mixed results from the self-applied sunless tanning solutions her mother insisted she try, Cahall heard about Steel Beach and told her mother about the salon.

"She was like, 'Great,' " Cahall said.

An average tanning session for Cahall is very different from what most people who visit tanning salons are used to.

There is no tanning bed, no blue UV light or radiation warning labels. Instead, users don their bathing suits and step into a booth. On the wall of the booth are a set of nozzles.

When the tanning session starts, the nozzles mist DHA solution onto the user. DHA stands for dihydroxyacetone.

It reacts with the keratin in dead skin cells and makes them darker, simulating a tan.

Since no tan is actually being created in the skin, sunless tanners should be careful to apply sunblock when going outside, even though they will look tanned, Obagi said.

"[But] it is definitely a safe alternative for [UV] tanning," she said.

Sunless tanning also takes much less time than traditional UV-based tanning, which often requires a number of 15-minute sessions for users to see their skins darken.

"This takes about six seconds," Cahall said.

But some experts warn that while sunless tanning is safe, the real problem is that natural paleness is frowned upon and viewed as unhealthy when exactly the opposite is true.

Dr. John M. Kirkwood, director of the melanoma and skin cancer center at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said, "The bottom line is healthy is not necessarily tanned. If we could go back to the days [when] sun-protected skin was [desirable] ... it would do us all good. The sun is the most accessible cause of this plague of melanoma [skin cancer]."

But for parents whose teenagers are bent on getting some color this spring, changing societal perceptions of beauty might take a back seat to reality.

It's that perception, and the commercial reality of it, that forced Master to reluctantly add two UV tanning beds to his salon.

"Spray tanning is new to the area and Pittsburgh is Pittsburgh. New stuff here is kind of tough," he said.

"They like the good, old-fashioned, tried and true, so I have a couple of regular tanning beds here, because people kept asking me about them."

Use of the beds is closely monitored, and Master does not allow anyone under the age of 18 to use them.

"People feel better when they're tan," he said. "People want to look good but they have to do it in a safe manner."