"Dorian, I know you preach natural tattoo removal. And after reading your guide I am already planning to buy my ingredients. But my wife is in the laser removal camp and has already done her first session. How much longer of a ride are we in for?"
Well the good news is that since you'll see results faster than she could hope to, you may be able to get her off of those expensive laser treatments :-)
But let's say she sticks to her guns and goes the full laser route. As much as I advocate the all-natural approach, I never say that laser removal in ineffective, since it's not. It's just more expensive and time-consuming. And a higher risk of side effects but that's the topic for a different article.
Six months minimum for laser-based methods
Why does it take so long? The sessions themselves are actually pretty quick, the technicians will laser the affected area for only a few minutes at a time. Their goal is to slowly vaporize the subdermal ink.
So why does it take so long? Because the process is imperfect and skin cells around the ink are also heated and damaged to some degree. If the damage is excessive we call that a complication or even a scar. But it happens every time to some degree, and that's why your wife needs to wait several weeks before she can go in for another session.
Six months is about the minimum time you can expect before a laser-based treatment reaches a satisfactory level of fading. How long can it go on for? Well the sky is really the limit, but as a probable upper bounds I'll say about two years. And those will be for bigger or more complex tattoos.
Color counts for removal time
Color heavily plays a part as well. Black, red, and deep blue tends to fade faster. Violets, greens, and other light colors especially will take much longer to remove, closer to two years than six months.
Sensitive areas?
If you have a tattoo on one of the sensitive parts of your body, first of all you're a trooper for getting it done in the first place! Second, yes it's going to take longer too. As the skin is sensitive more time between sessions is needed to make sure everything remains safe, or at least as safe as possible.
All-natural tattoo removal isn't just about money
Have you checked out my laserless tattoo removal guide yet?
A lot of people think at home tattoo removal is just about saving money, when in fact I think most of my customers get more out of removing it in just a few weeks then waiting months or years! I mean, how long do you really want to wait to get that ex's name off after a breakup? If you're going back to the dating scene, do you really want to wait a year with someone else's name on your shoulder?
Methods based on exfoliation seem fast when compared to year-long laser removal. But I actually consider it to be a slow process. First of all you need to apply in exfoliant several times for day (for most of the methods described in the guide). Layer by layer, the ink starts coming off. It takes several weeks before satisfactory level of fate is achieved.
But hey, I'll take weeks over years any day!
You should thank your local grocery store – it literally built you into the person you are.
Think about it: most of the cells of your body are replaced in days, months, or a few years. And what are they replaced with?
Food. Food you buy from your local grocery store. The food literally turns into you.
I bring this interesting thought up to help you understand just how powerful foodborne chemicals can be in altering your body. And yes, that includes removal of skin tattoo ink.
In fact not only is there a way to do so at your grocery store, there are several different ways, using different ingredients to do the same job. Here are just a few of those methods
Salabrasion
The salabrasion technique uses a mixture of water and granular salts, along with light sanding, to literally wipe the tattoo away using micro-friction.
Remember that salts are microscopic crystals, a fact obvious to tiny insects, but forgotten by large human beings. They have the same effect when applied to the skin in the correct way. No tool is right for everyone but the Salabrasion technique is one of the first I turn to when a tattoo removal client wishes to do a full removal in less than a month.
Aloe vera and yogurt
What if I told you that you could remove a tattoo and actually nourish the skin around it at the same time? You'd probably think I was trying to pull a fast one.
But applying aloe vera and yogurt in a specific formula, 3 to 4 times a day, has been shown to naturally exfoliate tattoos. This alongside providing vitamin E and other skin healthy nutrients directly to the skin. The aloe vera method is great for women and anyone with sensitive skin.
The sand powder method
Now we're getting a bit rougher. Sand powder is irritating to the skin, so I don't recommend this method to clients who have young or gentle skin. But for those willing to deal with the mild irritation for several weeks, this is one of the most effective and expedient natural removal methods there is.
Like the other methods discussed, sand powder is applied directly to the skin surface after a careful antibacterial wash and drying. The best way to apply the sand powder is using a soft wash cloth or towel soaked in warm water. Sponges also work for this.
The sand powder will act as a deep exfoliating agent, speeding up the skin cell rejuvenation process and pulling the deep layers of the skin, along with the ink and bedded, to the surface where it is then simply wiped away.
All of these methods come with their pros and cons. The Laserless Tattoo Removal Guide gives you the full details along with advice on what to do and what not to do for your specific situation and goals.
"Hey Dorian, can you give me a breakdown of the cost to expect with tattoo removal methods?"
When you're looking at laser-based methods, you're paying for an initial consultation followed by a per session charge.
Clinics that are hungry for business might offer the initial consult for free, but usually you're paying about $100 for the privilege. Basically the doctor or his assistant will look at your tattoo, tell you how easy or hard of a job it'll be for the lasers depending on the size, complexity, and amount of ink pigments used. And based on that plan he will recommend a series of laser removal sessions.
In essence you're being charged $100 or so for a sales presentation. But hey, when you get to call your clients "patients," you have that luxury :-)
So how about the cost per session? Depends on part of the country you're from, but expect to pay about $150-$400 per session. If you have a really easy removal job you may have as little as three treatments, but more likely you can expect to be going for five or more. It's not uncommon for someone to continue treatments for two years for larger tattoos that cover the whole of the back or thigh area.
Home-based removal: the cost of a grocery bill
Or not even that. Home-based methods can be surprisingly affordable because they use natural exfoliation to bring the ink up to the surface layers where it is then expelled through natural processes.
Take the aloe vera or lemon juice methods mentioned in my laserless tattoo removal guide . How much do these ingredients cost at your grocery store? $10 max nowadays? Unlike laser methods you'll probably pay a lot less for the removal than the actual tattoo!
Of course at home methods do require more effort on your part, since you'll need to keep to a schedule and exfoliate multiple times a day before you see a decent level of fade. Based on the money you're saving though, it's well worth it. I mean, when you look at a series of laser treatments, you're talking $500 at the very minimum for a small heart tattoo. $1,000 plus for a tattoo of any size, and well into the thousands for larger designs. And you're not even really saving time because you have to keep driving to the clinic and going through multiple sessions.
Just my opinion anyways, as someone who teaches and preaches home-based removal methods. You're free to make your own decisions my friend.
"I have a tattoo of my ex's name right across the front of my chest. She was great until she wasn't, that's all I can really say about her! Obviously I need to get this off but my friend who had laser removal said I might want to just do a cover-up instead. What are your thoughts, Dorian?"
Coverups can do a lot more than you think
You may think that covering up Jessica or Cassondra in block letters would be a difficult job. You might be surprised. Oftentimes we can hide these in dragons or other extremely complex designs. If the pattern is written in cursive, vines are an option, mystical figures, you name it. Any artist worth his salt can take what you have as a base and suggest multiple options to you.
As for me? I guess I got lucky because my ex had a short name :-) Lots of options there.
If you want it totally gone
Okay, let's say you've made up your mind already and you don't want the tattoo at all anymore.
Well you already know I'm an advocate of all-natural, laserless removal. Cheaper, safer, and more effective if you just follow the darn guide! (Here it is by the way
The thing I love about home based removal methods is that they reinvigorate the skin as well. Laser takes away, but exfoliation methods add fresh new layers of skin using safe, skin healthy ingredients.
For example my aloe vera gel method not only removes the tattoo but softens the skin around it! Yes, it requires 3 to 4 daily applications, but when you're talking just a few weeks removal time versus six months minimum for laser-based methods, the extra short-term effort is well worth it!
Hey Dorian,
When you talk about natural tattoo removal, how does it work exactly? I get that you're using body-safe, natural ingredients, but I don't understand how they act on the body to remove tattoos."
I've been getting a lot of questions about this. It seems a lot of people appreciate the safety aspects of natural removal (compared to laser), but don't quite understand how natural removal works.
Accelerated exfoliation
Did you know that your skin exfoliates on its own, without you doing anything?
It's true, in fact the layers of skin that you see are actually dead. That's why you can rub a fingernail against your skin and not even feel anything. But if you push deep or use the sharpened end of a pair of scissors – different story. You're going to feel it, and it's not going to be pleasant. In fact you may see some red. You didn't strike oil, but you did strike living skin cells.
Accelerated exfoliation gets to that layer. It does so by doing something the body normally doesn't do on its own -- it increases the rate at which living skin cells die and rise to the surface.
Now this may sound like a bad thing, but the other side to the exfoliation process is that young skin cells mature to take the place of the ones on the layer above them that much quicker as well. So there's no harm, and you get the added benefit of bringing up the deep subcutaneous skin layers that normally don't exfoliate at all.
These are exactly the layers that tattoo artists target as they embed ink. This is why tattoos hold for a long time even when the top layers of your skin do not.
You can see where this is going. To remove the tattoo, we then need to exfoliate deeper layers than normal. Here’s how: First we use various ingredients to enhance skin exfoliation. Then these deeper layers come to the top. The ink trapped alongside the deep layers comes up as well and wipes off with the brush of a towel.
Of course all of this is an abbreviated explanation and it's not going to happen that quickly, in fact it takes weeks. But when you compare that to the much slower “vaporize, scar, heal, and vaporize again” laser approach to ink removal, who in their right mind would choose laser?
Now you know why I say that the only people who choose laser removal either don't understand or have never heard about natural deep exfoliation. It's just plain a better method for tattoo removal.
Thankfully you don't have to make that mistake. If you don't already have a copy of the Laserless Tattoo Removal Guide, everything we talked about is in there, including the details on how to get it done with skin safe ingredients from your grocery store
Doreen Davis was kind enough to send me a copy of the Laserless Tattoo Removal Guide in exchange for an honest review. I know a lot of people with tattoos who would rather see them faded, covered, or gone altogether so I was eager to see and apply Dorian's teachings.
Initial Insights
The first thing I appreciated about the guide was that it actually explained what tattoos were at a deep level, including where they are located within the skin, and a host of other details I had no idea about. This was a pretty big deal to me because if I was going to be changing my body, I wanted to know what was going on.
Natural vs laser removal
You probably already know that laser tattoo removal is currently the "hot thing" on TV and local billboards. Heck I probably wouldn't of just done it myself if it wasn't so expensive!
But Dorian really goes into the laser removal process in a way you never hear about at a consult. He shows both the good and the bad that comes with using high-powered, medical grade lasers to vaporize skin ink. Without copying the whole chapter I'll say it really widened my eyes and made me rethink laser tattoo removal in a completely different way.
Actionability
Now were getting to the nuts and bolts, the actual tattoo removal methods. There are several of them each with their own benefits and drawbacks. Most of the methods rely on activating the skin's natural exfoliation process in order to drive subsurface ink up to the top. That's a much cleaner process than laser and the price is several magnitudes cheaper as well.
Even a skeptic would be silly not to start with these methods, considered laser is something like $200-$500 for a single session.
Overall
Do you have a tattoo? Do you want to remove it? Without paying thousands of dollars? Well then you must get The Laserless Tattoo Guide. That’s the bottom line. This is perhaps the best guide on the market for taking a tattoo off at home.
It also comes with a 60 day money back guarantee, so I suggest deciding whether to keep it or not 30 to 60 days after reading it. I've done this with other types of guides with guarantees and boy has it saved me from going down the wrong path, so take advantage.
Find the full guide here
Best of luck with your all-natural tattoo removal,
"Hey,
Thought experiment: if somebody took away all your knowledge and told you to go with the most popular route – laser removal – would you do it?
Hmmm… thought experiments. They push you to think about your position in a whole new way.
Would I do a laser removal if it was the only thing I knew for getting ink off my skin? No I wouldn't. The risks are simply not worth the benefit.
And I don't care if I had my ex-girlfriend Maria's name tattooed across my chest in big block letters, and my current girlfriend was fuming about it. I’d explain my situation to her using exactly what I'm about to tell you right now:
Laser removal damages skin cells
When you go into a laser removal consultation, either the doctor or his assistant will tell you that the laser they use is highly precise and specifically calibrated to target ink pigment cells.
All of this is correct. But what you may not hear is that vaporizing ink pigment heats up the skin cells around the ink, and can cause the skin cells to suffer water loss and premature death.
Fresh, living skin below the surface where the ink lies, are killed as a result of laser tattoo removal. The only question is how many?
Too many living skin cells killed and there is a substantial risk of scarring. Each and every time you visit the laser clinic, you contend with this issue.
Which brings me to my second point: Since vaporizing sub surface ink is relatively hard on the skin, doctors have to spread out treatments over months and years before the level of fade is good enough to call the job finished. It's just more opportunity for the skin to get damaged each time.
Infection risk
What happens to your body when it's knocked out of its natural balance? Opportunists quickly take advantage. And that's exactly what happens after a laser session that leaves your skin cells weak and unable to protect themselves. Infections can, and do occur.
Scar formation
An overgrowth of scar tissue called Keloid scarring is one of the more unfortunate side effects of laser removal surgery. Not only does an unattractive scar appear over the skin, but it is usually raised and textured as well. Unfortunately these are not temporary scars either.
Laser removal is uneven
The effectiveness of ink removal lasers is dependent on the laser's ability to target the specific ink pigment that produces the tattoo's color. If you have a multicolored tattoo, this is bad news. It's very unlikely that a black, blue, and red tattoo will remove evenly.
Is the risk worth it?
Even if we make-believe that there are no natural tattoo removal methods, there's always the cover-up option. A coverup takes what you thought was a tattoo that couldn't be turned into anything else, and makes it something completely different. I've seen ex-girlfriend's and ex-boyfriend's names turned into unicorns, tribal symbols, you name it. It can be done.
So my answer again to the question "laser tattoo removal or nothing" is absolutely nothing (or the coverup instead).
Okay, now that we're back to reality, and natural methods do exist, the Laserless Tattoo Removal Guide will be of help to anyone who doesn't feel like spending months and thousands of dollars on an inherently more risky procedure than simple homebased exfoliation methods. Check out the guide here:
