Tattoo Removal

Tattoo Removal Lake Worth West Palm Beach Wellington Loxahatchee Royal Palm Beach

How do you remove a Tattoo with a laser? 

Tattoo removal lasers (also called Q-Switched YAG lasers) work by producing extremely short pulses of intense light that pass harmlessly through the top layers of the skin to be selectively absorbed by the tattoo pigment. This laser energy causes the tattoo pigment to shatter into smaller particles that are then removed by the body's immune system. Researchers have determined which wavelengths of light to use and how to deliver the laser's output to best remove tattoo ink. (If you're wondering if the laser might also remove normal skin pigment, don't worry. The laser selectively targets the pigment of the tattoo and rarely damage the surrounding skin.)

Why are tattoos so difficult to remove?

When you get a tattoo, the artist has a wide variety of inks to choose from. The color of the ink, the number of particles of ink and the size of the ink particles determines how hard it will be to remove the tattoo. Some colors don't absorb light very well. The less light the ink absorbs, the harder it will be to shatter the ink particles into "bite size" bits that the immune system can remove. Even more important is the size of the ink particles. Very large particles will require more treatments to cause the particles to crumble into smaller particles that can be removed.

Why does tattoo removal require a special laser?

Most lasers and Intense Pulsed Ligtht machines deliver pulses of light that last between 0.005 seconds and 0.200 seconds. At those settings, the pulses of light are cabable of heating the target (hair, ages spots, spide veins, etc) hot enough to make them disappear. Tattoo ink cannot be heated hot enough to make the ink disappear. Even if you could get the ink hot enough, it would burn the skin long before the tattoo would be affected. Instead, we have to hit the tattoo ink particles with light so hard that they rattle, but so fast that they don't get a chance to get hot. This requires pulses of light that are much shorter than 0.005 seconds. Our Q Switched YAG Laser produces pulses of light that last 2.5 billionths of a second (2.5 nanoseconds or 0.0000000025 seconds)!