The most well-known and highly recommended tattoo removal process is laser tattoo removal. But, how do lasers remove tattoos from your skin, exactly? Tattoo removal lasers work by targeting tattoo ink with a color specific wavelength of light that effectively breaks up the pigment in the skin into tiny particles that can be processed and removed by immune cells, which is why your tattoos will show the most fading over several weeks following a tattoo removal session.
Most tattoo inks are contain heavy metals and that persist under the deposited under your skin your immune cells engulf it. Tattoo ink resides inside and outside of cells within the dermis (underlayer) of skin.
Tattoo removal lasers like the picosecond lasers used in our Portland tattoo removal shop, work to break up larger particles into smaller ones that can be effectively processed by the immune system and cleared away. The chosen frequency of light that the laser emits is specific to the color of the ink. These lasers are very high energy and generate pulses of a trillionth of a second, which is necessary for breaking up the ink particles. This process, called photothermolysis, fractures ink particles and mobilizes them for clearance by immune cells. This is why laser tattoo removal is the most effective method of tattoo removal, and why we recommend this method over any other methods of tattoo removal.
