When you’re young, inking any and everything on your body could seem like no big deal. However, some of those questionable pieces of body art can sometimes become embarrassing or even regrettable as you get older. That’s why a New York tattoo studio is offering real tattoos that fade in only a year, meaning even if you change your mind, you won’t have to live with a reminder of your bad choice for very long.
- Ephemeral Tattoo has designed special tattoo ink. That ink fades over time, meaning the body are you get today will be gone in about a year. PhD Chemical Engineering graduates Brennal Pierre and Vandan Shah got the idea back in 2014 and tested more than 50 formulations before coming up with the final product.
- So what’s it made of? According to Harper’s Bazaar, the secret of the fading tattoos comes courtesy of a mixture of ink polymers and dyes that create the awesome effect. “With our background in biomolecular engineering, we’ve worked with protein stability and protein development. Tattoos are just interactions between the skin (the protein in this case) and the ink, so that’s why this problem was of interest to us,” Pierre explained. “They are medical-grade biocompatible and biodegradable, so they are meant to be broken down over time.”
- Just because it fades doesn’t mean it doesn’t look good. Shah and Pierre insisted that while they wanted to create an ink that would eventually fade, they still wanted it to be high quality and to stay vibrant for a while. They performed surveys that found most people preferred ink that would last between nine and 15 months, but their first trials showed ink that lasted only about a week. However, they eventually found the perfect formulation.
- They tested the product on themselves. Both Shah and Pierre have tested their inks by getting nearly 100 tattoos between them, most of which have faded away by now. “I have tried more than 60 tattoos during the development time. I think I have five or six on my body currently,” Shah explained.
- Of course, you’ll still have to sit through the tattoo process. Other than the fact that the ink fades, everything else about getting a fading tattoo is the same, including the discomfort of getting one. If you can face that, your options are endless!
