Chapter 1: What are the health concerns associated with tattoos?
Hi, I'm Rose Rimler, filling in for Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus. Today, we are talking about tattoos. Tattoos are more popular than ever, but lately they've been getting some flack. Online, we're hearing that tattoos are toxic. What is a toxic guy tattoo?
Upper chest, Roman numerals. That is always a toxic guy. Everyone knows one of those guys.
No, not that kind of toxic. Like, poisonous.
But turns out tattoos are actually pretty unhealthy for us.
Chapter 2: Do tattoos really increase the risk of cancer?
You're constantly being poisoned by the toxins. If I were to go back in time with the knowledge I have now, I would not have the tattoos that I have.
People are pointing to tattoo ink, saying that it's full of stuff that you don't want in your body.
Every single person who has a tattoo has metals leaching into the bloodstream. Mercury, lead, nickel, and other harmful heavy metals that will slowly release in your body, adding to your toxic burden daily.
And ultimately, they say that the consequences can be serious. A new study has found it could increase your risk of developing cancer.
Chapter 3: What happens to tattoo ink in the body?
21% chance of getting a malignant lymphoma with even small tattoos.
And if this risk is real, it would affect a lot of people. According to surveys in the U.S. and Australia, a third of adults are tattooed. And globally, that number is one in five. So are these people making a terrible mistake? If you get a tattoo, are you poisoning yourself and upping your risk of cancer? And finally, has science found any benefits to getting inked?
Because when it comes to tattoos, there's a lot of... Upper chest Roman numerals. But then there's science. Science vs. Tattoos is coming up after the break. Welcome back. We are here to talk about tattoos. I'm Rose Rimler, and I'm here with Science vs. Editor and tattoo haver, Blythe Terrell. Hi, Blythe.
Hey, Rose. Famed tattoo haver, I will say. So how many tattoos do you have? Where are they? Spill it. So the first one I got, I got with my good friend like when I was 18. We both got flowers. It's just like, I'm 18. I have a flower. My husband and I have one that's kind of like I love you in sign language.
Chapter 4: What are the potential immune system reactions to tattoos?
It's stylized. I have a stylized double helix tattoo. On my ankle. Very nerdy. Very on theme. And then my other one is the Batman logo. But it is the 1960s Batman. I've always kind of been curious about it. Why Batman? So my initials are B-A-T. And so it's been like a running joke. Okay. But you're the Batman.
Revealed on this podcast. Have you ever worried about your tattoos?
No.
I mean, my mom worried that I wouldn't get jobs. But, like, health-wise, I mean, I guess only to the extent that I was like, okay, is this guy getting, like, a clean needle out of the package? But beyond that, no. It has never come up for me.
Yeah. And... I was pretty surprised myself when I saw this stuff pop up online about tattoos being toxic. I don't have any tattoos myself, but I know so many people who do. So I really want to know, is this true or is this just BS? Yeah. Very curious to know what you found.
So, you know, obviously tattoos have been around thousands of years, but interestingly, scientists have only recently began to study how the tattoo ink interacts with our biology. This is kind of on the newer side of things. Scientists like Santiago Gonzalez. He is a toxicologist and immunologist at the University of Lugano in Switzerland.
It actually started by chance, so we were not primarily oriented on the tattoo.
Here's what happened. Santiago needed to label mice for an experiment they were doing about the immune system. The way they had been doing that was putting a tag on the mouse's ear, like tagging their ears, which is very common.
But... I never liked it because it's a bit heavy and the animals is a bit annoying for the animal.
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Chapter 5: How do tattoos affect mental health and body image?
Right. It's not what they were studying. They were just using the tattoos to label the mice for another experiment. But after seeing this, they decided to do an experiment where they tattooed the mice and then watched where the ink went in a more controlled way. Okay. So we did all this again and then took photos of the lymph nodes two months later. So let me show you.
Oh. Oh, yeah, you can really see, like, it's really, you can really see the ink in there.
It's bright, yeah. It's a few different colors of ink, and you can see, like, one mouse has a pretty bright blue limp node, like bulbous little... Goofy thing. So how did that happen? Well, okay, so your body has these white blood cells. They're called macrophages that go around gobbling up stuff that they think shouldn't be there. So this is typically like bacteria, broken bits of cells.
When you get a tattoo, macrophages in your skin, they go around and they slurp up some of that ink. And it turns out that they're also bringing that ink to the lymph nodes. And scientists have also seen this in people.
We've had case studies documenting it, like if someone with tattoos goes in to get their lymph node biopsied for whatever reason, pathologists will sometimes find ink in the lymph node. And Santiago's team also found this when they looked at lymph nodes from people, which led him to conclude... When you are tattooing your skin, you are also tattooing your lymph nodes.
Okay, so we have tattooed lymph nodes, but does that automatically equal some kind of a problem?
Well... It's possible. I mean, if the lymph node is involved, that means the immune system is involved in some way. So Santiago's team also checked levels of immune markers in the mice's bodies to see if they were elevated.
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Chapter 6: What insights do experts provide on tattoo safety?
That would suggest that they were stressed out, basically. These are molecules that are part of the body's stress response to injuries or illness. And he did find that these molecules increased in both the lymph taken from the lymph node and in the mice's blood. But most of that activation went back to normal after a week or so from getting the tattoo, which makes sense.
Like, of course, you'd have a temporary inflammatory response to a bunch of needles in your skin.
Chapter 7: Are there any benefits to having tattoos?
But there was one exception, a molecule associated with chronic inflammation called It's actually called Alarmin. Great. Yeah. What was the Alarmin doing, Rose? It was alarmed. It was raised even two months post-tattooing, which Santiago argues should have been past the initial healing phase of the tattoo. Uh-huh. Okay.
So how worried should we be about that? Well, you know, Santiago's study was kind of exploratory.
It showed some hints of some immune system weirdness in mice. It wasn't looking at long-term issues in real people. So zooming out to other studies, we do start to see that this activation of the immune system might be a problem for some people. I read this case study, a guy from Poland. He had a full-blown immune reaction to his tattoo four months after he got it. He lost his hair.
He developed vitiligo. What's that?
Chapter 8: What should you consider before getting a tattoo removed?
That's like a skin, a change in the color of your skin. Okay. And he had to get the tattoo essentially cut out of his arm. There's another series of cases that was published recently in Australia about people who got this allergic reaction to their tattoo ink and it attacked their eyes. Oh, my God. And some of them even had vision loss. Those examples are extreme and they're not that common.
But in general, we do see a lot of allergic reactions to tattoos. Just typically it's confined to the skin.
Actually, you know what that makes me think of, Rose? So the other day I was sitting with my husband and he looked at me and he was like, do your tattoos ever itch? And I was like, no. Do your tattoos ever itch? And you know what else, Rose? Huh? He has some, like, immune system stuff going on a little bit. Another autoimmune system thing. So I kind of had this feeling.
As you say this, I'm like, oh, I wonder if, like, suddenly there's this change. And, like, the itchy—like, Jack's tattoos are getting a little itchy.
I wonder if it's related. Okay. Interesting. Well— The best numbers I could find on how common this is, this like sort of skin reaction to tattoos, it comes from a survey of people with tattoos in Germany. And it found that about 9% of people reported persistent skin problems at least a month after they got their tattoo. And so it sounds like he might be in that unlucky sliver of people.
Lucky in love, unlucky in tattoos.
Obviously. So this happens to a fraction of unlucky people, 9% in that German study. But there are other reasons to be concerned about tattoo ink that's more universal for everyone who gets tattooed.
Mm-hmm.
One of those things is the fact that a lot of tattoo ink contains chemicals that we think are possibly carcinogenic. Hmm. And that includes black ink. You know, a lot of your tattoos are black, I noticed.
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