Your drunken mistaken need not be a mistake anymore: a PhD student from Nova Scotia may have just changed the tattoo-removal game.
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, Alec Falkenham has invented a pain-free lotion that may soon replace lasers for the tattoo removal process. The lotion works with the body’s natural healing process after the skin is tattooed. It contains liposomes, “manmade-spherical vesicals normally used for administering drugs,” which directly target the cells containing the pigment.
Maybe now we won’t all be tattooed grandparents! The cream is patented, but not yet ready for commercial sale. Falkenham is still unsure how many applications will be needed to fully erase the Chinese character for “tiger courage” on your lower back. (Oh, you thought we didn’t know about that?)
Falkenham told CBC:
“When comparing it to laser-based tattoo-removal, in which you can see the burns, the scarring, the blisters, in this case, we’ve designed a drug that doesn’t really have much off-target effect. We’re not targeting any of the normal skin cells, so you won’t see a lot of inflammation. In fact, based on the process that we’re actually using, we don’t think there will be any inflammation at all and it would actually be anti-inflammatory.”
Here’s Falkenham explaining exactly how the cream will work:
