WHY TATTOOS ARE PERMANENT
For a long time, it was thought that tattoos were permanent and once a tattoo was applied, you were stuck with it forever. However, thanks to the introduction of Q-switched laser technology, laser tattoo removal now offers a safe and effective solution for unwanted ink that only takes a matter of minutes to perform.
You may have noticed that tattoos naturally change colors or get lighter after many years. That’s because your body’s immune system naturally recognizes tattoo ink as a foreign substance and tries to remove the ink particles in your skin the moment their placed there. However, the ink particles are too large and deeply placed for your immune system to completely break them down. This means the ink remains trapped in your dermis. Laser tattoo removal speeds up the natural fading process by shattering those large ink particles into smaller pieces that your body can flush away more easily.
HOW LASER TATTOO REMOVAL WORKS
When you get a tattoo, large ink particles are injected into your skin and reside in the dermis, the deepest layer of the skin. During treatment, our Astanza Duality laser sends pulses of light energy through the skin and targets the ink particles. Our laser creates amazingly short laser pulses that only last for nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Because the laser pulse is so brief, the power emitted is high enough to shatter the ink but short enough for there to be no risk of damage to the surrounding skin tissue.
The ink particles absorb the laser’s light energy, heat up, and shatter into fragmented particles. These fragmented particles are small enough for your immune system to more easily remove, significantly fading your tattoo.
It takes multiple treatments to access all of the varying depths of ink in a tattoo. Our laser first targets the shallowest layers of ink and works its way down to the deepest layers. Professional tattoos with complex materials and ink density typically require more treatments than those amateur tattoos with a lower density of ink. A variety of factors are used to assess the total number of treatments your tattoo will need.