Wow, today in an amazing advancement that our tattoo-friendly streets of Seattle might appreciate: A tattoo-removal topical that costs as little as $5 per treatment.
The news comes courtesy of the CBC. A researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, 27-year-old Alec Falkenham, is developing the cream that he says will “make tattoo ink eventually fade away.”
Falkenham, who is working on a Ph.D. in the university’s pathology department, says there’s no injection and no inflammation to the process, and that tattoos should just “fade away.”
“When comparing it to laser-based tattoo removal, in which you see the burns, the scarring, the blisters, in this case, we’ve designed a drug that doesn’t really have much off-target effect,” he told the CBC.
Here’s how the magic stuff works: When a person gets a tattoo, the ink triggers an immune response, and cells called “macrophages” move into the area and “eat up” the ink. Some carry the ink off, but most stay embedded in the skin. Falkenham’s cream works by targeting these macrophages with new ones that “move in to consume the previously pigment-filled macrophages.” The new ones then simply carry the old ones off through your lymph nodes.
Falkenham is working with the university to patent the technology, and they have secured more funding for research. Right now, they are unsure how many applications it would take to completely fade a tattoo, but he says it would work on ones more than two years old. They are currently testing it on the tattooed ears of pigs.
Pigs! Could this story get any better?
If this works, we should all send Falkenham a big thank you for helping eliminate bad tattoos everywhere.
