HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

I wish everyone a super fun day blowing stuff up!

Tattoos and Laser Removal

Recently, my coworker showed up to work sporting band-aids concealing identical parts of both of her forearms. From these, small curly letters peeked out—the edges of lettering tattoos. A few years ago, this would not have piqued my curiosity—of course tattoos were to be hidden at work! However, after spending the last semester looking at the cryptic words printed on my university professor’s arms and trying to place the green creature (an alien perhaps?) on a TA’s shoulder, my coworker’s concealment marked me as slightly strange. Yes, the stigmatism around tattoos is lessening; That is not to say that Fortune 500 CEOs and Wall Street executives are starting sleeves and getting their faces inked, yet the modern tattoo wearer is far from the archaic delinquent youth stereotype.

            Part of this societal paradigm shift is due to the availability of laser tattoo removal. Recently, after showing my mom the art from a series of watercolor tattoos on the internet, her only reaction was to maintain that the people in the images would eventually regret their choices. The hate towards tattoos stems from their permanence; thus, the decision behind each tattoo can be considered extremely weighty. Having a failsafe, i.e. laser tattoo removal, voids these ideas, and thus, makes the prospect of a tattoo slightly less (heavy). Tattoo removal is very accessible, safe, and easy to research the mechanics of**. (In short: Small, powerful laser pulses heat tattoo ink, causing it to expand quickly and burst apart; into pieces the immune system can rid itself of.) Laser provides a way to revoke a tattoo, and the implications of this are many.

            The largest is the effect on tattooing: It becomes free to evolve as an art form, as the tattoo audience becomes older, younger, more mature, and broader. Tradition and meaning can give way to beauty and whimsy, as tattoo artists and consumers alike can explore without fear of permanence. Different people have different design ideas. The evolution of tattooing can be seen already—wrist tattoos, biomechanical tattoos, watercolor tattoos, all are fairly new creations. Tattoo removal brings a new art form into mainstream acceptance. While doing so, it also encourages a general acceptance of self-expression.

**For a comprehensive and simple guide to understanding tattoo removal and the tattoo process, go to the New Look Tattoo Removal Guide