Tattoo regret is fairly common, and with the popularity of tattoos seeming to grow, so are the number of people who later want to have them removed. Over the years, tattoo removal has grown less painful and more efficient, enabling physicians to treat a wide range of ink color, and design size.
"There are many people who come to me and they say, 'I did this when I was young and foolish and now I'm grown up and in the business world," says Boca Raton dermatologist Dr. Janee Steinberg. "A corporate man wants to play golf - he can't take his shirt off. There are many names that are no longer in the person's life." Dr. Steinberg has seen, and removed, a wide range of tattoos. I've removed scorpions, snakes, you name it; all kinds of crazy tattoos and there are a lot of machines out there to perform this procedure with."
Laser tattoo removal results of Dr. Janee Steinberg
Dr. Steinberg says that an evolution in the equipment has allowed for easier tattoo removal. "The earlier machines were not as good as the equipment we have out today. The key to this is doing repeated removal without being too aggressive each removal so that you don't leave scarring behind. I believe if you take any machine and turn it up to its limit, you could probably remove a tattoo in fewer treatments, but you're going to definitely scar the patient.."
It is important to bear in mind that many colors don't respond well to the lasers, and often only a portion of the tattoo can be removed. "So you need a machine that has the ability to do black ink and red ink at least. The other colors - green and purple and orange and yellow are very difficult to remove, and the patient has to really understand that going into this that you may not be able to remove every bit of ink that they have. They really have to know that going in. They don't build a machine to treat yellow tattoos, they don't build a machine to remove purple tattoos. It's really a 1064 and 532 wavelength of light that treats the black and the red - and the green and the blue are the offshoots of the 532."
Laser tattoo removal results of Dr. Janee Steinberg
Dr. Steinberg says that in her opinion, a new tattoo is easier to remove than an old one. "Nobody has really done a study on whether you can remove a tattoo faster if it was just put on. I have had quite a few young people who come home with tattoos and their parents get very upset and they drag them into the office and they want them off that day and the earliest one I've ever done was within 2 days - and I've got to tell you - I think it's faster to remove a tattoo that's freshly put on than if you wait months, weeks and even years."
The removal process is painful, but it is manageable with the use of topical anesthetics and local injections. According to Dr. Steinberg, tattoo removal is likely much more painful than actually getting a tattoo; something you may want to consider before you decide to get inked.
