Very tasteful art.
Oh, you hate it?
You're not alone.
One in four people with a tattoo regret it.
25 million people in the US.
Getting ink carved into your body permanently has exploded in popularity in the last few decades, especially among millennials.
Often their tattoos were about a current cultural thing, a moment in their life following a trend expressing individuality, or about feeling like being part of something greater.
That's all fine and good, but as people age they often stop identifying with what their younger versions wanted on their skin forever.
Or sometimes their tattoos simply just look ugly or have aged badly.
And so today, laser tattoo removal is booming, being as normalized as dentist appointments.
Which is wild, since lasering a tattoo away is one of the most metal things you can do to your body.
A high-tech procedure that's extremely painful and makes your skin explode from the inside.
How does it work?
I might be missing that.
We explained what a tattoo is in detail before, but in a nutshell, from the perspective of your cells, your tattoo is a mountain range of colorful boulders, from small to building-sized, injected deep into your dermis by violently ripping huge wounds with gigantic needles.
Your body is trying hard to destroy the tattoo, but the ink particles are way too large to be transported away and your immune cells can't eat them.
So they do the next best thing, keeping the ink trapped in a prison of flesh.
This is why tattoos remain forever.
Millions of your cells give their lives to keep the ink in place.
When they die, new ones take their place.
In principle, removing a tattoo is very easy.
Just destroy the ink particles.
The hard part is to do that without destroying you.
Amazingly, the best way is still to blast you with a deadly laser.
Lasers, UV light, Wi-Fi or X-rays are all the same thing.
Electromagnetic radiation.
Photons that travel through space at the speed of light in the form of a wave.
The more energetic they are, the higher their frequency and the more punch they carry.
Imagine your skin as jelly and your tattoo as crumbs of toast.
If you shine a flashlight against it, most light passes right through the jelly, but the darker toast crumbs absorb more light and are clearly visible.
Likewise, certain laser frequencies mostly pass through your skin without doing damage, while dark ink particles soak them up.
Depending on the color of your tattoo, we need different lasers.
Red ink reflects red light but absorbs green light, so you need a green laser.
Black ink easily absorbs all types of light and is the easiest to remove.
But even with the right color, tattoo removal lasers are still pretty powerful and can still leave horrible injuries, scars or change your skin color permanently.
So, instead of shooting your skin with a continuous ray of death, modern tattoo removal lasers shoot an extremely brief pulse a packet of electromagnetic energy that lasts about a few trillionths of a second.
So short that the beam ends before the first photon even hits the skin.
Okay, enough theory.
Let's laser your mistake away and experience the fun of tattoo removal together.
But laser removal is expensive, so let's start by taking care of your finances.
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And now...
Let's laser a mistake away.
Take a deep breath.
This is going to hurt.
Let's slow down time.
Zap!
The pulse of high-energy photons hits your arm nearly at the speed of light, shooting through the dead layers of the skin, passing into the dermis.
Most cells are like jelly to the laser and don't absorb much energy, escaping its deadly power unharmed.
The flood of photons moves on and reaches the mountain range of ink embedded deep in the prison of your flesh and cells.
Only a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, has passed, but now things escalate rapidly.
As the photons hit the black ink on a molecular level, they smash into electrons and are absorbed and annihilated, transferring all of their energy into them.
This sudden influx of energy almost instantly turns into a massive amount of heat that has nowhere to go.
The ink particles burn up to a seething hot 600 degrees, hot enough to make iron glow red hot.
Overwhelmed by the sudden heat, the ink particles expand rapidly and are mechanically stressed to the max, violently ripping and fracturing, almost exploding.
The mountain range cracks into millions of seething hot pieces and a bit of hotting dust.
Which wouldn't be that bad if this was not going on inside your skin.
Water in your tissue and inside your cells instantly vaporizes and expands quickly, ripping cells apart and growing into gigantic caves of hot steam bubbles inside your skin.
This sudden expansion creates a shockwave that hits tissue nearby, causing more mayhem and damage.
Your cells that were keeping the tattoo in place a moment ago are having a really bad time.
If they had kept tattooed particles safely stowed inside of them, they're cooked or ripped apart.
The cells that surrounded the Ink Mountains are gravely wounded or burned alive by the sudden heat or steam.
A few tiny blood vessels in the area are ripped apart violently.
Thousands of your cells are dead or hurt.
And then the next laser pulse hits again and again, moving over the tattoo like an orbital bombardment.
From your perspective, all this is happening so fast that you only notice one thing a sharp pain like being electrocuted, a smell like burnt hair and, most disturbingly, a loud crack.
Where the laser hits, your tattoo instantly turns white, which is called frosting, and is the bubbles of hot gas expanding under your skin.
To ease the pain, the area is often cooled with a stream of cold air for a moment before the laser moves on again.
Inside your skin, the tattoo is now a crushed mountain range of carnage and death.
The cooked and ripped remains of cells float in a mix of hot ink and water vapor that are cooling down.
Many more cells are injured and are chemically screaming for help.
It's like an internal burn wound.
The brutal aftermath.
Hundreds of thousands of immune cells, like macrophages, stream into the wound to clean up the mess.
They order inflammation so your blood vessels open up and water rushes in.
Your wounded skin starts to swell up and turn red.
As your cells begin cleaning up casualties and helping with wound healing, they also meet loads of hot ink particles.
It's now that your tattoo is actually being removed.
The same immune system that kept it in place is now helping to clean it up.
Many of the smallest particles are simply rinsed away by the flood, while macrophages devour some of them and transport them to your lymph nodes.
If possible, they'll be broken down further and ejected from your body via your urine.
If not, they'll just collect inside your lymph nodes and stay there probably for the rest of your life.
So, hopefully, you got the tattoo from a pro and the ink is not toxic.
But the majority of ink particles are either still too large or there are just too many of them.
So your immune and skin cells, in a brave effort to protect you, once again swallow and bind them in place.
This is why a laser tattoo removal usually takes between 5 and 12 sessions.
Each time a part of the tattoo is transported away and an even larger one is cemented in place again.
You get to enjoy watching this process happening in real time.
Within the first few hours, the frosting under your skin fades and the skin around the tattoo feels like a bad sunburn.
Red, swollen and stingy.
Often it rises with fluid-filled burn blisters that you should leave alone.
As the pain calms down, it's replaced by soreness.
Over the next few days, the wound will remain red, swollen and tender and begin to itch.
The itching is a direct consequence of your immune cells actively healing you, so maybe that gives you some comfort.
After about a week, the wound may crust over as new healthy and pink skin replaces injured skin.
Things slowly get back to normal.
Your tattoo will usually be noticeably lighter, although not that much if this was your first session.
Over the next few weeks it will get a bit lighter still, as your immune system keeps transporting parts of it away.
Modern laser tattoo removal has gotten very good, so if you chose an experienced professional, you should be completely healed after two months.
But if you didn't, or if you had the procedure done with older tech, sometimes there might be a slight scar or the color of your skin may change slightly in places.
Although this is pretty rare nowadays, please do your research when deciding who you're going to allow to shoot lasers at you.
In the best case, after a number of sessions, your tattoo is no longer visible, or only very, very faintly.
Whether it will disappear completely depends on the size of your tattoo, the colors that were used, how deep the ink was injected and, to a degree, how good of a job your body does cleaning up the mess.
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Try it.
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I've been missing that.
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