Get Black-and-Blue Monkey Off Your Back: Kill Tattoos (Update1)

By Kate Shellnutt
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Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) — Ines Marcial is sick of wearing pants to her office in Los Angeles. A black-and-blue dragon, wrapped around her calf and shooting flames across her foot, has kept her out of skirts and sandals.

Marcial, 24, an administrative aide for the Directors Guild of America, paid more than $3,000 for a dozen laser treatments to begin removing the tattoo, once a “permanent'’ memory of her stay in Japan as a U.S. Marine Corps logistics specialist. Without it, she will look more professional and make amends with her disapproving parents, aunt and uncle, she says.

Following the tattoo boom in the U.S., inkwork removal is surging, with tens of thousands of patients a year. Erasing tattoos, at a cost as much as 10 times the original work, long was more painful than obtaining them. Doctors couldn’t guarantee treatments would work on certain ink or skin colors. That’s changing because of improved lasers and inks.

“The industry has come a long way, from early methods with side effects and worse results,'’ said Alex Kaplan, a dermatologist in Los Angeles who sees 50 to 85 tattoo-removal patients a week, most of them white-collar 20- and 30-somethings. “And the future holds promise for better effectiveness.'’

At least 62,000 people in the U.S. had tattoos removed in 2003, the latest statistics available, up 27 percent from two years earlier, according to the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Almost one in four American adults ages 18 to 50 has one or more tattoos, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, based in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Health Concerns

Getting rid of a tattooed name is the top motivation Americans cite, a Harris Interactive survey found in 2003. Health concerns were also on the list, as patients removed artwork whose inks migrated or faded under their skin or caused an infection, according to the research.

Tattoo inks aren’t regulated, so doctors don’t know exactly what chemicals may be entering people’s skin or their lymphatic system and bloodstream, according to chemists at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who found heavy metals in some inks during a 2005 study.

Tattoo erasing is part of a $1 billion annual market for cosmetic procedures involving lasers, according to CIBC World Markets in Toronto. Specialty laser clinics, such as Kaplan’s Tattoo MD, are cropping up nationwide. The Los Angeles woman Marcial says her foot-long dragon’s scales have faded after being treated with light to destroy the ink.

Pulsed Beams

Lasers, once effective only on dark inks, now have settings that adjust pulsed beams, allowing them to dissolve almost any color. The lasers no longer scar darker skin and are less painful than older methods of cutting, sanding or burning away unwanted artwork, dermatologists say.

“I was afraid it would scab over, but my skin’s healing well,'’ Marcial said, after being treated with a MedLite laser.

More than 2,000 clinics worldwide use the MedLite, at least four times as many as a decade ago, says Timothy Gehlmann, the chief executive officer of Hoya ConBio, a division of Tokyo-based Hoya Corp., which makes the equipment. U.S. sales of tattoo- removal lasers, costing more than $100,000 each, will double to $27.2 million annually by 2011, according to Millennium Research Group in Toronto.

Hoya’s American depositary receipts rose 40 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $34.25 in over-the-counter trading yesterday.

It takes six to 10 laser treatments, each usually priced at $100 to $700, depending on size and ink colors, to obliterate most tattoos. The costs for each square inch of skin treated are higher than for any other laser treatment because of the number of visits required.

Price Range

The total usually tops that for getting the art in the first place. A tattoo the size of a matchbox may cost around $75 to apply. The price for removing it would be about that much for each treatment, totaling $500 to $750.

Matt Hough, a 29-year-old surfer-skater with thick-lined, brightly colored inkwork of flaming stars, a demon, the grim reaper and others across his body, paid about $200 for an artist to shade around a half-dozen tattoos, including a thorny flower with a skull in the center and an image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, on his left arm. Then he laid out $1,000 to have the shading removed when he didn’t like the effect.

“I knew pretty much immediately after he finished with it,'’ said Hough, who performs risk management for Wells Fargo & Co.’s San Diego office, where his tattoos are tolerated. “Within a week I said, `This has got to go.”’

Independent business owners invest $300,000 to $800,000 initially to open franchised laser-treatment businesses, according to the International Franchise Association, a Washington-based trade group.

A New York company called Freedom-2 Inc. plans to release its only product, a new kind of ink with pigments designed for easier removal, to tattoo parlors in November, said Martin Schmieg, president. Because all the colors are in tiny capsules designed to react to a single wavelength of light, all of them could be dissolved in a single laser treatment, the company says.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kate Shellnutt in Washington at kshellnutt@bloomberg.net .