Have you been considering getting your regrettable tattoo laser-ed off? The first thing you need to do is be prepared, because the process can be both tedious and ridiculously expensive.



Over at Cosmopoliton.com, Carly Cardellino reveals what she had to endure to remove a tattoo from her foot. Cardellino consulted with Dr. Paul Friedman, a cosmetic dermatologist based in Houston and New York.

For Cardellino's case, Dr. Friedmann recommended to her two options: a Picosure laser treatment which works well for black and brighter colors like green and blue; and the 532 Nanometer Q-switched Nd:YAG Laser which works effectively on red ink.

The entire year-long process occurred every four weeks to allow the skin on her foot to heal from previous sessions. Here's how she described the tattoo removal process:
...Friedman's staff would numb up my foot with Emla, a topical numbing cream, and then inject lidocaine to intensify the numbness before he would use a combination of the Picosure and the Q-switched laser to eliminate the rest of the teal moon and the entire red star. Friedman told me that using a cocktail of lasers isn't uncommon, especially when you have a multicolored tattoo and that I'd see results much faster — and it was true. It took only a few sessions to see the tattoo lighten up overall, but it wasn't until almost 18 sessions later that I saw my tattoo totally disappear.

He explained to me that the laser works by penetrating the skin, breaking up the ink particles, which would bring the ink from inside of your skin cells outside of them. When this happens, your body's own immune system recognizes the ink as a foreign object and gradually eliminates it over time through your lymphatic system. Holy shit. This explanation totally took the attention away from the zapping of the laser, which I barely felt anyway, but I'd describe as a rubberband snapping against your skin over and over at a rapid pace. It even sounds that way.
Cardellino goes on to explain why it took so long to zap the tattoo off. For more, you can read the full post here.