DIY at Home Tattoo Removal
Are you wondering, “How can I remove a tattoo at home?” Many people seek an inexpensive, natural way to remove tattoos without enduring the pain and cost of laser treatments. Some of the suggestions we’ve come across are quite wild, but none are things we would recommend.
1. SALT?
One of the most common home tattoo removal methods we’ve seen is salabrasion, or rubbing the skin away with salt. It’s an old method and technically can work if you manage to remove enough skin to reach the layer where the ink is embedded. You could also achieve the same result with coarse sand or sandpaper. WE DO NOT RECOMMEND that anyone try it at home! This process is extremely painful and leads to significant scarring. While removing a tattoo with salt may technically work, the result is often replacing the tattoo with unsightly scar tissue.
2. ABRASION/ DERMABRASION
This method is similar to salabrasion but uses mechanical abrasive tools like coarse sand, a metal file, or sandpaper instead of salt. Like salabrasion, this approach guarantees extreme pain, significant scarring, and a high risk of infection.
3. HEAT
To remove a tattoo with heat, you would need to apply enough heat to burn away the epidermis and cause third-degree burns to the dermis layer. The tattoo will be gone, along with your skin and hair, leaving you needing a skin graft to repair the damage. This will result in permanent scarring. Additionally, third-degree burns come with a high risk of infection as the burnt skin begins to necrotise.
4. HOME CHEMICAL PEEL
Any attempts at topical tattoo removal will fail because the epidermis acts as a barrier, stopping the chemicals from reaching the tattoo. But what if you burn off the skin with a powerful acid?
Administering a chemical peel at home to remove a tattoo is another extremely painful process that comes with a near-guarantee of severe scarring. There are well-known photos circulating online of people who attempted this at home. While the tattoo ink was removed, it was replaced with a large tattoo-shaped keloid scar—a painful, permanent reminder of why you shouldn’t use an at-home chemical peel for tattoo removal.
5. LEMON JUICE
The most popular suggestion we see for home remedies has to be lemon juice. The active ingredient of this method would be the mild citric acid, but it faces the same problem as most topical solutions: the acid isn’t strong enough to reach the tattoo.
The top layer of your skin, the epidermis, is composed of dead skin cells that effectively protect the living tissue underneath from most harmful things you encounter day-to-day. Lemon juice simply isn’t strong enough to penetrate the epidermis and reach the tattoo beneath. If you leave it on your skin long enough, you might feel mild discomfort, which could trick you into thinking it’s working. It’s not.
There’s a whole list of other common household chemicals (and even foodstuffs!) that people try on their skin, hoping to remove tattoos. Honey, essential oils, hydrogen peroxide, bleach, and more have all been suggested as ways to lighten or remove tattoos. Some might seem to work temporarily by causing skin irritation, but if any of them reach the living dermis tissue, you’d know immediately by the severe pain, likely followed by a trip to the emergency room.
One chemical deserves special mention: quicklime, or calcium oxide. Quicklime is a fairly common household chemical used in cement mixing and other applications. In small quantities, it’s even used as a food additive to balance acidity. You might be familiar with self-heating tablets for meals when hiking or in emergencies that use quicklime to generate heat by reacting with water.
Quicklime reacts violently with water to release heat. Rubbing quicklime on your tattoo won’t do anything except cause a burning sensation. However, if you get the powder in your eyes, nose, mouth, or lungs, it will react with the water in your tissues, burning you. DO NOT apply quicklime to your skin.
WHAT ABOUT PROFESSIONALLY PRODUCED TATTOO REMOVAL CREAMS?
The internet is full of products that claim to safely and effectively remove tattoos. However, none of these have been proven to be either safe or effective by the FDA, meaning their claims are fraudulent.
Topical creams have the same problem as home remedies: anything strong enough to reach your dermis by burning away the epidermis with acid or oxidisers will also burn the dermis. This would leave you with severe pain and scarring. Anything that doesn’t cause this pain and scarring isn’t strong enough to affect your tattoos.
The best way to use home remedies or topical creams on your tattoos? Avoid them. Or, in the case of lemon and honey, maybe just stick with putting them in your tea instead?
Can you remove a tattoo at home? was originally published in Tatt2Away on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
