![]() ![]() People can even go online and order a bottle. Lots of manufacturers offer a rainbow of ink colors. "You know, did it bubble up, did it just come out, did it cause itchiness, did it do stuff like that? That was, you know, kind of your trial and error." ![]() "And then they would see if there was any kind of reaction," Knopp explains. Sometimes artists made their own ink, testing it on themselves. "They poured stuff out of these bottles that were wrapped and hidden, and you couldn't know what it was or you didn't know where they got it from," he says. Knopp recalls that that 30 years ago, it was hard to come by any information about what a tattoo shop was using. One basic question that scientists have is: "The whole kind of picture, right down to what a tattoo actually looks like in the body, is still a surprisingly open research question," says John Swierk, a chemist at Binghamton University who just got a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the chemicals in tattoo inks can be changed by exposure to light. But the small number of researchers working on questions related to its safety say that a lot about tattooing remains mysterious. The art form goes back thousands of years, with tattoos found on mummies. One survey found that 40 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 have a tattoo. ![]() "The EU has really moved to be on the cautious side, and really sort of ban anything that even has the slightest suggestion that it could be a carcinogen," he says.Īll of this is happening as tattoos have surged in popularity in recent years. ![]() But he says extrapolating from lab studies to potential real-world health dangers in people can be difficult. Walter Liszewski, a dermatologist and cancer researcher at Northwestern University who treats reactions to tattoos, says he's in favor of government oversight to ensure public safety. "You're talking about 65-70% of the palette that a tattoo artist uses."īarth previously helped found a group called the Coalition For Tattoo Safety, which has lobbied against proposed legislation that would strengthen oversight of tattoo inks in the U. It's also going to affect purples, some browns, a lot of the mixed tones, the muted tones, your skin tones, all this stuff," he says. "It does not only affect all your green tones, or all your blue tones. Mario Barth, the owner and founder of Intenze Tattoo Ink, made a video warning that the ban would have dire consequences. Her institute recently examined the two pigments and said they appeared to have "a comparatively low level of toxicity" but that it wasn't possible to provide a reliable health risk assessment because of a lack of data. "That just went into action but is highly disputed," says Ines Schreiver, who studies tattoo ink at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. The new rules say that pigments called Blue 15:3 and Green 7 must be phased out over the next year. Now the European Union is harmonizing tattoo ink rules across the continent. "You can't tell me that all these other inks are bad, especially when I'm using them in the states."įor years, individual countries in Europe have required labeling of tattoo ink ingredients and have limited certain chemicals that are thought to cause cancer, damage DNA, or trigger allergic reactions. You almost feel that, how are you only allowed to use certain inks?" says Matt Knopp, owner of Tattoo Paradise in Washington, D.C. Some artists here say the European restrictions don't make any sense. Meanwhile, in the United States, where about a third of Americans have a tattoo, tattoo ink is almost completely unregulated and there's little known about what's in tattoo ink. Tattoo artists in Europe are fighting a new ban on two commonly-used green and blue pigments, saying that losing these ink ingredients would be a disaster for their industry and their art. The European Commission is phasing out some types of tattoo ink, including those that include two widely-used blue and green pigments. A tattoo artist at work in Berlin on June 12, 2020. ![]()
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