Imagine having a tattoo that you can turn on and off whenever you want? Well, that’s reality now (and no, we’re not living in an episode Black mirror!)
There are tattoos on the market that are semi-permanent, and of course everyone plays around with temporary tattoos at some point in their lives, but none of them compare to permanently marking your body in a way that will always be there, but can be hidden in moments when you want it.
Imagine this: you got a tattoo you love, but you want it gone because you’re going to visit your grandma who hates tattoos. Instead of putting on another layer of clothing, what if you could just make the ink disappear?
Celebrity tattoo artist Keith “Bang Bang” McCurdy, along with a great team that includes University of Colorado mechanical engineering professor Carson Bruns, HYPRSKN scientists, and board-certified dermatologists, created Magic Ink that allows you to do just that.
“Magic Ink is a safe, biocompatible tattoo ink that you can control using different lights,” New York-based Bang Bang tells PEOPLE exclusively. “That’s the simplest way to put it. It’s made of medical-grade polymer, and once you’re tattooed, you can turn the ink on and off with a light.”
Yes, you read that right — you can literally make your tattoo disappear and reappear with a simple light pen that you shine on your skin, à la the disappearing ink we used to write secret messages to our friends in the 90s.
Bang Bang admits that much of the science behind Magic Ink is “brain-wracking” to explain to consumers, but it’s important to understand the technology of how it all comes together, because of how fascinating it all is, and because of the level of security involved.
In order to reduce brain melting to a minimum, let’s break it down more simply.
Magic Ink tattoo in action.
Boom boom
How does magic ink work?
The magic ink, which is currently only available in red, is activated by light after it is tattooed into your skin.
The ink turns on and off with UV light, but not any UV light that could damage your skin. That’s why a team of scientists and dermatologists is in place to ensure that every part of this process is safe from the inside out.
Bang Bang says it was a “process” of finding the exact right wavelength – or nanometer – of UV light to turn the tattoo on and off, as this affects the speed of the reaction.
“It was a balancing act, because it could have been a slow process of sitting under the light and almost burning the skin, but we didn’t want that,” he says. “Like this, it’s like a magic trick. On. Off.”
In short, one wavelength of UV light reacts with the ink under your skin to make it visible, while another wavelength of UV light reacts with the ink to make it disappear again. To activate and deactivate the tattoo, you use the light pen that you get when you get the tattoo, which you can see in the videos here.
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Why Red?
Bang Bang, who tattoos at his own studio called Bang Bang in New York, decided to start with red ink because he felt it was the right complement to black. He didn’t want to replace the black, he wanted a color that would dance with it.
“It was about combining Magic Ink with standard tattoo ink, and I think red does that best, so that’s why I chose it,” he says. “Still, some people will use Magic Ink independently of standard tattoo inks, and that’s cool too. Everyone’s welcome.”
It is not necessary that he and the team started with colors, and that is certainly not the end. He’s still testing the blue color (he currently has his own blue Magic Ink tattoo), and yellow will be next. Once they have three primary colors, the possibilities become endless.
“We did a bunch of batches that were terrible,” he says of where the paint process began. “Some didn’t work well on the skin, some weren’t compatible with our tattoo needles, or just had a hard time putting the maximum particle load with minimal damage. I probably have 50 of these in different formulas tattooed into me, as did the other founders until we came to one that we decided felt and felt like tattoo ink.”
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Magic Ink tattoo in action.
Boom boom
Will tattoos deteriorate over time?
When you look at a tattoo that someone has had for decades, it – understandably – looks very different from how it looked the day the person got it. This is because your body breaks down the ink after it comes into contact with it. Although Bang Bang and the HYPRSKN team haven’t had decades to test Magic Ink yet, they’ve cycled tattoos on skin 10,000 times so far and it hasn’t shown any significant deterioration.
“Everything dies with time,” explains Bang Bang. “But we did 10,000 tests, which we thought was about the equivalent of 30 years of activating and deactivating the tattoo. Then we will do 50,000 tests. We only had it in our skin for five years and it still works. We will learn more along the way, but all we can do is fast-track the study.”
Leaving it activated — or visible — won’t degrade faster either. It simply just changes the look of your tattoo.
“This ink works like a door,” Bang Bang explains to PEOPLE. “So if you give UV light, the door opens and you can see into the party. And if you give him a white light, the door will close. You just choose, essentially, the structure of the particle. Is the door open or closed? But there is no change in behavior and he prefers neither.”
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Bang Bang at work.
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How safe is it?
Bang Bang repeatedly emphasizes when explaining Magic Ink that it is extremely safe, like any good tattoo if you go to a reputable tattoo artist and studio. Magic Ink, at the forefront of modern tattooing, may just be “the safest tattoo ink,” says Bang Bang.
Because Magic Ink is made from a medical-grade ingredient — polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) — it is strictly regulated. It is the same polymer found in dermal fillers and is highly biocompatible. The ink is inside these polymers, and because the polymers are so uniform, the ink won’t break down like it usually does with standard tattoo ink. This means that the ink is less likely to migrate under the skin and cause reactions.
HYPRSKN offers a full explanation of the safety precautions the team took while testing Magic Ink, and Bang Bang also notes that all of the tattoos they created during the testing phase were overseen by a board-certified dermatologist and that each one was deemed safe, successful, and effective.
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Does it hurt?
A Magic Ink tattoo feels just like any other tattoo and heals just like any other tattoo. If you closed your eyes while the artist was putting the Magic Ink tattoo into your skin, you wouldn’t know it was any different from a standard tattoo, despite being made with a different ink.
Where you’ll see a slight difference, Bang Bang says, is in the immediate appearance after the Magic Ink tattoo is complete. When a standard tattoo is finished, it is the freshest and most beautiful it will ever be. This is not the case with Magic Ink.
“You actually have to heal the tattoo before it’s at its most amazing,” he says. “You have to completely rejuvenate and heal the skin. It’s delayed gratification. It almost looks like a scratch when it’s first done. Then through the healing process, it looks like a normal tattoo, then in two weeks, two months, six months, as your skin rejuvenates , Magic Ink becomes completely invisible, and then the fun happens.”
As for using light to activate or deactivate the ink, that doesn’t hurt either. It’s not hot, you won’t feel a burning sensation either on the skin or under the skin. You won’t feel anything at all while the ink is activated. There is nothing scary or unsafe about this process. But if you think a regular tattoo hurts, a Magic Ink tattoo will hurt too. It’s a pin after all!
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Where can I get a magic ink tattoo and how much does it cost?
Bang Bang and his team of artists were the first to do Magic Ink tattoos, but more and more artists around the world are being trained to use the ink. Because it behaves like a standard tattoo ink, it should catch on, but the team behind it want to make sure all artists using it understand how it works before they start tattooing with it.
About 15 countries are represented, Bang Bang says, in this first phase of artists being trained to use Magic Ink. Here you can find a Magic Ink tattoo artist. Prices will vary by artist.
Bang Bang, who has an elite clientele in New York that includes Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Justin Bieber and many more – and who recently tattooed Dua Lipa on Late Night with Seth Meyers — has already done quite a few Magic Ink tattoos and was doing them long before the official announcement. He says he’s now looking forward to the next steps in modern tattooing and the “funniest things” he can “dream up” along the way.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education