Atomic Kitten singer Natasha Hamilton has revealed she was diagnosed with skin cancer, saying she initially thought it was a “mosquito bite”.
The 42-year-old said she received the diagnosis last year after feeling an itch on her back following a holiday in Majorca while speaking on Good Morning Britain.
She said: “I’d been on holiday, and I wasn’t actually in the sun a lot, because my baby was only about five months old, and I was breastfeeding.
“And one afternoon I had her on my lap, and my back was in the sun and I burnt, and I don’t know whether it was later that day or the next day, I had, like an itchy spot on my back, and I just thought it was a mosquito bite. Didn’t think nothing, you don’t get to look at your back very often, do you? It’s tucked away.
“I felt it and went, ‘oh, mosquito bite’, it wasn’t until maybe four weeks later, when I was at home and it was itching, and I was like, hang on a minute that seems a bit long for a mosquito bite.
“I asked my husband to have a look, and he went, ‘oh, that’s not a bite’, and he took the picture, and when I looked at it, I went, ‘okay, I think I know what that is’. Originally it had just been a dark freckle that I’d had on my back for many years, it wasn’t raised, it wasn’t a mole, it was just a freckle.”
Hamilton went on to say she was later diagnosed with a “basal-cell carcinoma”, and added that she thought her use of sunbeds during her early days in the girl group in the late 1990s and early 2000s could have contributed.
She added: “People of my age will probably feel the same, or remember, if you were going on a night out you used a sunbed because you wanted that sunkissed look to make yourself feel good and give you a bit of confidence. If I was going to do something like Top Of The Pops or a big TV show, I’d want my look sunkissed, so we would go to the sunbeds.
“There was a sunbed shop based in the hotel that we stayed in all the time in London, and I’d use tan accelerators, and I can honestly say I don’t think there was ever a time when I went on a sunbed that I didn’t burn. Looking back now, because I’m type one skin anyway, I’m not supposed to be in such intense sun.”
Hamilton’s mother Maria was diagnosed with the same type of cancer after Hamilton noticed a mark on her face, and urged her to get it checked.
She said her mother was initially told by doctors that the patch of skin was “nothing”, before she urged her to ask to be referred to a dermatologist a year later, who told her it was skin cancer “straight away”, before arranging for her to have them removed.
Speaking in 2022, the singer, who has four children, said she had changed her lifestyle to lower the risk of increasing her chances of skin cancer following her mother’s diagnosis.
As part of Atomic Kitten alongside Kerry Katona and Liz McClarnon, before Katona was later replaced by Jenny Frost, Hamilton scored 13 UK top 10 singles and four UK top 10 albums – they are best known for the songs Whole Again and Eternal Flame.
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