New York startup aims to leave a mark with ephemeral tattoos

New York startup aims to leave a mark with ephemeral tattoos

Neither a permanent mark nor a paper transfer: a New York start-up has created the first tattoos that fully disappear after a while, aiming to open the body inking market to new clientele. "It's going to fade so I'm not too concerned,“ says Abigail Glasgow with a mischievous look in her eye, as the first letter of her fiance's name is tattooed on her forearm. For years, amateur tattoo artists around the world-mainly in Asia-have offered "semi-permanent“ tattoos, claiming that using vegetable ink and less penetration of the skin will cause them to disappear eventually.

But in practice, the tattoos tend only to deteriorate, without vanishing completely and often causing lesions, to the point that several professional tattooists have sounded the alarm. After six years of development, the company Ephemeral has created an ink composed of biodegradable polymers that dissolves naturally between nine and 15 months after the same inking process as a conventional tattoo. Josh Sakhai, one of the three co-founders of Ephemeral, was a student at New York University when he wanted to get a permanent tattoo but was "too scared“ because of how his Iranian-origin family might react.

So he set out to create a temporary tattoo made of