Hooray! We don’t have to remove tattoos with sandpaper anymore
Lasers? Pssht. Your ancestors are not impressed.
Stop complaining. Not only is laser tattoo removal relatively painless, it’s LASERS, MAN. Bonus.
Imagine dipping your Nickelback tattoo into acid, or sandpapering your ex-husband’s name off your inner thigh. Basically, life sucked before lasers. Write that down.
In the centuries-old practice of tattooing, only the past 40 years have offered gentle and safe ink removal. But if you got drunk and tattooed a sexy mole on your lip in ancient Rome, you’d literally have to burn the regret off your skin — with a hot iron.
Mostly creative and always painful, tattoo removal up until now has reflected humans’ fraught relationship with permanent ink. Sometimes tattoos were involuntary, statements of servitude or slavery; other times a person’s tat simply fell out of vogue.
Recent polls estimate roughly three in ten Americans have tattoos. Forty-seven percent of millennials and 36 percent of Gen X have at least one. In 2013, however, people asked for 45,224 tattoo removals, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.
Most historians believe as long as the tattoo has existed, so have methods for getting it the hell off our bodies. The ancient Egyptians tattooed people — mostly women in the arts — as far back as 2000 B.C. But one of the first pieces of evidence for tattoo removal comes from Aëtius of Amida, a Byzantine Greek physician who recommended puncturing the inked skin and rubbing salt and lime on it. Tequila!
Salabration: It’s believed that in ancient Rome and Greece c. 500 A.D. soldiers were tattooed with insignia of their legion, such as eagles on their hands. Criminals or slaves were pricked with tattoos as a form of stigma. Aëtius recommended the following prescription for removal:
In cases where we wish to remove such tattoos, we must use the following preparations… There follow two prescriptions, one involving lime, gypsum and sodium carbonate, the other pepper, rue and honey. When applying first clean the tattoos with nitre, smear them with resin of terebinth, and bandage for five days. On the sixth prick the tattoos with a pin, sponge away the blood, and then spread a little salt on the pricks, then after an interval of stadioi (presumably the time taken to travel this distance), apply the aforesaid prescription and cover it with a linen bandage. Leave it on five days, and on the sixth smear on some of prescription with a feather. The tattoos are removed in twenty days, without great ulceration and without a scar.
Hot iron: Dr. Marvin Shie suggests in a 1928 journal, “A Study of Tattooing and Methods of its Removal,” that one of the earliest methods of tattoo removal involved burning. “When the dead skin sloughed off, it took the mark with it but usually left a bad scar in its place.”
Injecting poop: Though the results are unclear, some early chemists ostensibly imagined that injecting substances like pigeon excrement, wine, or lime into tattooed skin would diminish ink over time. Jury’s still out.
Scabs: In the 1920s there were three main types of tattoo removal: surgical, chemical, and electrolytic. The latter involved inserting a heated needle into the tattoo several times to cause “blanching.” This process creates scabbing, “which drops off in the course of a week or so, taking the pigment with it.” tl;dr There were some hardcore scabs in the Roaring Twenties.
Elbow grease: When people high-key regretted their ink, they turned to scrubbing their skin raw with sandpaper [GRAPHIC VIDEO], pumice stone, and other abrasive implements. Dating back to ancient times, the practice was a more primitive version of dermabrasion still used in some modern medical procedures.
Pigmentation: In a charming New York Times article from 1989, the author shares updates of the latest laser removal technology alongside cringeworthy history: “Over the centuries…white pigment has been injected over the unwanted tattoo. Some desperate bearers have tried slicing into the tattoo and rubbing salt into it to wear the skin away.” Bring on the sedatives.
Skin grafting, excision: If you’ve made it this far, you can stomach how people sloughed their tattoos by literally removing layers or sections of skin with surgical tools. The practice is sometimes still employed today.
I remember a patient who was tattooed at 18 while in the Army. When he was discharged, he had a high-powered government job and was embarrassed by his ugly tattoos. He asked to have them removed, and the only methods available at that time were excision and skin grafting, which left disfiguring scars, but he wanted the surgery. —The New York Times, 2007
Makeup: Let’s end on a mellow note. Rather than lacerate a tattoo typo, people have traditionally used heavy stage makeup to temporarily cover their ink. Popular cosmetic foundations now market directly to tattoo owners who need a camo. After all, no one wants to see Scarlett Johansson’s tragic rib tattoo in a sex scene.
