Rose Rimler

And in fact, outside of this, studies do find that something like 20 to 25% of people regret at least one tattoo.

Christelle says the thing about that is...

For as little as we know about the effect of tattoo ink on the body, we know even less about what happens when we shoot lasers at tattoos.

The laser blasts the ink into smaller fragments that the immune system then can go and clean up.

But you're still like getting your immune system to, you know, you're triggering an immune response.

And you're also changing the molecules.

And some of those are worse than the original molecules in the ink.

So, for example, we know that a lot of the colors in tattoo inks are made with nitrogen groups called azos.

And when azo's are broken apart, they can form compounds that we know are carcinogenic.

Might be.

I mean, there's a lot we don't know.

We should be getting more information about tattoos generally over the next five or ten years.

Christelle is going to keep studying people.

She's got this cohort, you know, she's going to keep studying them.

There's another project that's backed by the World Health Organization that's getting off the ground, following people with tattoos over a number of years.

So we're going to find out more about tattoos and health.

Right.

Well, yeah.

I mean, and the thing is, like, with anything that we talk about, it's always like risk versus benefit, you know?

Benefit looks cool.