Do you ever regret getting that tattoo? People often do — and then discover that removing it is a long, slow, often expensive and sometimes painful process, the results of which are by no means guaranteed.
But thanks to Professor Edith Mathiowitz of Brown University in the United States, you might never need to again. Whenever you fancy new body art, a single laser treatment will clear the way — because the first durable, but easily removable, tattoo is just around the corner.
The secret lies in microencapsulation, a process already used in many other applications, from drug delivery to magazine scratch-and-sniff perfume advertisements. This traps a useful substance inside a harder polymer which only breaks under controlled conditions — being rubbed in the scratch-and-sniff perfume, or in the gut for some drugs.
Here, the plan is to trap the tattoo inks in microscopic polymer beads. But whoever thought of applying it to tattoos? ”The idea began at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by Dr Rox Anderson and by Bruce Klitzman at Duke University,” says Mathiowitz, whose expertise lies in encapsulation research for pharmaceutical delivery systems. ”Both of them approached me to take their idea further so that we could create a permanent but removable tattoo. Our challenge is to find the right combination of polymer and dye, and make it still hard enough so that you can push it through the skin and have it stay there.”
That will be done conventionally, using sharp needles — tattooing is a painful process, and making the end result removable hasn’t changed that. But when you want to remove the tattoo, the polymer beads can be burst with a single laser treatment, releasing the ink, which then degrades naturally.
The now-colourless bead coatings remain inert in your body, although bio-erodable ones — which would create a tattoo that would fade over time — are also possible.
”Traditionally, black ink absorbs all wavelengths of light. Our particles, however, were engineered to absorb more light at specific wavelengths, focusing the energy better on the beads and allowing the body to remove the tattoo ink,” says Mathiowitz. ”The non-erodible polymers will be left behind in the body. The bio-erodable ones will be more challenging. You can design them to disappear after three months, six months or a year.”
A New York company, Freedom-2 Inc, expects to start selling the new ink to tattoo artists in December. This will use biodegradable and bioabsorbable dyes encapsulated in microscopic (5-6 microns) poly- methylmethacrylate beads suspended in solution.
Dr Nick Lowe is a consultant dermatologist and skin laser expert at the Cranley Clinic in London. He’s also a spokesperson for the British Skin Foundation, the charity for skin disease research. He deals with all manner of skin problems, including tattoos which are painfully removed using lasers that shatter the pigments into pieces small enough for the body’s immune system to deal with.
His advice? ”Don’t run in and get these done. It’s a lot easier to have one put in than it is to have it taken off,” says Lowe. ”The laser treatment can damage the skin and permanently give you white scarring”.
When shown Freedom-2’s before- and-after publicity photographs of a tattoo trial, he points to areas of remaining tattoo and, more significantly, the removal of normal skin pigment and a loss of freckles. He also worries about possible allergic reactions, as well as simple lumps and bumps from the polymer.
”Has there been enough study done on this type of ink-polymer system to make sure that it is not, in some instances, difficult to remove?” asks Lowe. ”I think that it’s a fascinating concept that needs considerably more research.” — Â