For those of us who have trouble finding the time for the basic appointments like dental check-ups, the idea of multihour trips to the tattoo removal specialist seems impractical at best. But if that lower-back tattoo of your now college boyfriend’s name is begging to be erased, you’re in luck. A new product is changing what we know about tattoo removal and making treatments faster and more effective.
You May Also Like: This May Just Be the Newest Pain-Free Way to Remove Tattoos and Birthmarks
In a normal tattoo removal session, the laser passes over the tattoo once, targeting the ink trapped beneath the dermis to catalyze your immune system’s removal of the color. After one laser pass, the skin whitens and appears to have bubbles trapped beneath the surface (known as laser frost), which prevents additional laser passes from being effective for up to an hour. After one laser treatment, patients are encouraged to wait at least six weeks until the next—meaning that fully removing a tattoo can take months or years.
Bye, Meghan. During laser treatment, the skin appears to bubble and whiten, which is called laser frosting.
With the DeScribe PFD Patch, laser frosting is reduced, which means that wait time between laser passes is shortened as well. By minimizing the downtime needed between lasers, the patch allows the specialist to do more in each laser treatment, which means fewer sessions overall and fewer dollars spent.
A tattoo removal specialist lasers over an unwanted tattoo with help from the DeScribe Patch.
You’ll be able to get rid of your tattoo faster and easier thanks to perfluorodecalin (PFD). The liquid, a fluorocarbon known to provide oxygen to the skin and dissolve gases (remember the gas bubbles caused by the laser?) also refracts some of the laser’s light to reduce the scattering of the light into layers of your skin that don’t contain ink. This means that for a tattoo that would normally take 20 laser treatments to get rid of—a sizeable stamp—about half the treatments would do the trick.
Though we still don’t recommend running to the nearest tattoo parlor and asking for your favorite celeb’s face inked (tattoo removal still costs multiple times what you’ll pay for tattoo application), this new product makes the process of removing the existing product of your quarter-life crisis on your rib cage accessible for people who don’t have the time and money to spend a year at the dermatologist’s office.
