26 Mar How Does Tattoo Removal Work?
Your friends tried to tell you. Your mom certainly tried to tell you. Repeatedly.
Now, here you are a few years later staring at the goldfish tattoo swimming up your arm and thinking, “What the crap was I thinking?”
You’re not alone. Because even though tattoos have become as mainstream as apple pie – with around 10 million of your fellow Americans sporting at least one somewhere on their bodies – about 20 percent of the people who get a tattoo later regret it.
Tattoos, though, are supposed to be permanent, and removing them is no walk in the park. But…removing a tattoo today is a lot easier than it was even five years ago.
Before lasers became a popular tattoo removal method in the late 1980s, people with tattoo regret couldn’t do much about it. Back then to get a tattoo removed, you had to go through a procedure like dermabrasion (where the tattoo was basically “sanded” off), surgical excision (where the tattoo was removed with a scalpel!), or acid treatments (yup, just like it sounds). These procedures were painful, lengthy, and often not very effective. You’d have to hate your goldfish pretty bad to go to the trouble of having it removed.
Thankfully, we now have lasers that do the heavy lifting.
How Lasers Work.
Lasers remove tattoos by emitting short pulses of intense light that pass through the top layers of the skin where they are absorbed by the tattoo pigment. This light is harmless to the skin, but causes the tattoo ink to break into small particles that can then be removed by the body.
Most tattoos require several treatments for effective removal, depending on factors like tattoo size, location, how old the tattoo is, and the colors. The easiest color to remove is black because it absorbs all laser wavelengths, while other colors absorb light selectively, depending on the hue.
Each treatment takes just a few minutes, and a three-week interval between treatments is usually necessary to give the body time to absorb the ink residue.
Next Level Technology.
Until recently, the gold standard in tattoo removal was the Q-Switched laser, which uses thermal energy to heat up and break apart the ink particles. The new generation of tattoo removal technology is the PicoSure laser – which is the technology we use at Ink On Ink Off. PicoSure emits ultra-short pulses (one trillionth of a second) that hit the ink, shattering it into tiny dust-like particles that are more readily absorbed and eliminated by the body.
That may not sound like much to you, but better clearance of the ink particles mean fewer treatments, more effective ink removal, and faster recovery time. That’s HUGE in the tattoo removal world.
For more information or to schedule a free consultation, just give us a call. We also recommend that you take a look at the video located here (LINK: http://picosure.com/tattoo-removal/) on the PicoSure website.
INK ON INK OFF IS A NEW CONCEPT, CLINICIAN-LED TATTOO CENTER LOCATED IN CLEVELAND, OHIO, THAT SPECIALIZES IN CLINICAL ARTISTRY TATTOO REMOVAL, TATTOO REDESIGN / ALTERATIONS, AND NEW ARTISTRY.