'Laser tattoo removal? Poo? Pooing out your tattoos to the point where they no longer exist? Er, The Debrief... can you explain this rather weird and brain boggling concept please?!'
Yesterday someone on Reddit unearthed this video from 2014 from Destin Sandlin at Smarter Every Day, a channel dedicated to exploring the world using science. It's very good. Destin is an engineer and has a lovely Southern accent too.
This video is extra interesting though. It explains how laser tattoo removal works and how, eventually, you poop your old tattoo out.
For the video, Destin actually gets a tattoo just to get it removed. That's dedication to the cause.
Basically, when you're tattooed, Dr. Lappert, a plastic surgeon in the video says, the needles puncture your skin and push big ink particles down through your epidermis into your dermis (the inner layer of skin). When they reach their destination, white blood cells detect a foreign object and try to gobble it up. The trouble is, the ink particles are too large. As Dr. Lappert says, its like 'trying to take a bite out of an elephant'.
The white blood cells do have some success which is why tattoos do fade over time.
So how does the laser removal help? Well, when you hit the pigment granule with the laser, the pigment granule will 'shatter' into smaller and more 'edible' pieces. It serves to speed up the process by which the white blood cells remove the pigment.
Where do the white blood cells take the pigment? According to Dr. Lappert, they go 'Through the lymphatic channels of the skin into the larger lymph channels deeper down and ultimately throught the liver for lceaning up and excretion'.
Or, as Dustin puts it, ' You're eventually going to poop out your tattoo.'
That is VERY COOL SCIENCE.
Why wasn't that in GCSE biology?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.