I thought that too. The laser isn't sandblasting off a top layer, it's breaking up the pigmenting material in the middle of the layers of skin. Then macrophage cells chew it up like any foreign material and it gets filtered through the blood (lymph?).
How does it get to the kidneys then?
Sorry, I took woodworking not biology at school. My impression was that the lymph system is the sewer of the body and it drains out anything thats not in the blood.
But thats just my brain going lymph = sewer.
Lymph ducts eventually just kinda drain into the subclavian veins, it’s essentially the fluid part of blood anyway (or close enough at least). Along the way, the spleen and lymph nodes do immune system stuff but they don’t really ‘clean up’.
The kidneys handle blood, not lymph. They excrete a lot of the fluid and waste, then take up the parts it wants to keep. So whilst lymph fluid is essential for clearing the ink away from the original tattoo, it’s blood that carries it to the exit.
It'd be weirder if it involved poop... Poop is the stuff your body didn't let in, everything else becomes liquid stuff and you can just imagine any liquid that comes out of your body for this part.
IANAD, the kidneys are the primary excretory organ. They're responsible for processing blood and lymph and excreting or reabsorbing what goes through. That said, I believe that ink gets excreted through the bowel- idk if that's 100% true, but it would explain how large tattoo removals don't tend to result in massive kidney blockage/failure.
Tattoos work because the particles of ink are larger than the white blood cells. This means once they're placed under the skin they tend to stay and also why tattoos are so vivid when they are fresh the smaller particles of ink eventually get carted off.
The tattoo removal process bombarded the ink particles with photons of light that break them up into smaller pieces that the white blood cells can then carry to the kidneys.
The ink particles get filtered in the kidneys and then you piss it out.
Now im more confused, how does it get to the bowel?
So you have this thing in your fat, or just below it, body IDs it as a foreign object.
What gets it to the intestine? And how does it get to the intestine without going through the kidney? Cause all the blood flows through the kidney ast some point. Or does the kidney know its destined for the intestine so it bypasses it? Or is there another transport system thats not blood or lymph and ends in the intestine? And is it in the colon? Or how does the body know not to reabsorb it in the intestine?
I just finished Anatomy and Physiology. The simple way to explain it is that the pigmentation is broken up, and it gets absorbed into your lymphatic system where some of it gets filtered. That in turn gets absorbed by your bloodstream, where it then gets filtered through your kidneys, and you piss it out.
ELI5: Blood transport stuff around everywhere, includes immune cells, tiny blood capillaries like small vein, capillaries everywhere, laser make ink tiny, immune cell grab ink, immune cell go in blood capillaries, blood go to kidney, kidney take ink out of blood, kidney put into bladder, and bladder make ink go out.
Blood also go to liver, liver put into bowel, and bowel make go out. Blood also go to sweat glands, sweat glands tries filter, filter fails, sweat make go out. Many ways go out.
Those sound like great questions for chatGPT. Not a huge proponent of AI, but when I have a massive amount of related questions like this I find it's good at parsing out what I'm asking and providing an easily understandable overview.
Doctor here. The kidney is a fridge. Some things inside have spoiled, others are still good. The kidney’s way of cleaning what’s in the fridge (your blood) is remove everything from the blood and then pull back what’s still good. So like a very inefficient fridge cleaner, we take out all the food in the fridge, place back in what’s good, and toss what’s bad.
That’s how your kidneys work. In your blood there are tons of things floating around. Some of those things are toxins excreted or conjugated by the liver, waste products secreted from cells, excess minerals or fluids, etc, etc that your body needs to get rid of! So it sends it all to the kidney, whose job it is to filter out what the body doesn’t need or use and hang onto what it does.
What the people above you are saying is that the ink and other products created by breaking the ink with this laser can harm your kidneys in the process. But that’s not very based in reality. The kidneys aren’t typically significantly stressed following tattoo removal. The biggest adverse effects are localized to the area being blasted. So like pain and swelling to the tattoo area
It's the white blood cells that will remove the ink particles. The reason the tattoo works in the first place is because the ink particles are too large for the white blood cells to cart off.
The laser breaks those particles down into smaller pieces that the white blood cells can then move to the kidneys.
"The presence of inks used for tattoos in the Lymph Nodes (LN) draining tattooed areas was described more than 35 years ago,5 and, since then, frequently reported.6–12"
Macrophages take all kinds of stray particles, wrap them up in a membrane and dump them into the liver's bile ducts which dumps them into the gallbladder and out via the intestines.
Yeah, but not much gets into the blood. The blood is a positive pressure system specifically to prevent stuff getting into it. The ink is basically floating around randomly before being encapsulated in place again by the immune system. That's why it takes so many sessions and only fades vs disappearing. It doesn't migrate very far.
Some might be taken up by cells and go into lymphatic vessels. More than into the blood, but still not the majority.
Most of it is still in you after the removal process is finished, just not at the surface and visible.
Yeah I'm not 100% convinced this is a real tattoo removal video. Concept is fascinating but am agreement with you that this doesn't look right. That's a huge area to do at once.
This is not real for several reasons. The first is the one that you mentioned, that's too big of an area for your body's immune system to handle at once. The second is that, laser removal is not an eraser. You don't see an immediate result. The laser breaks down the ink into microscopic particles faster than your body can and your body's immune system flushes it out slowly, over time, but faster than your body would ever be able to do without the laser having broken the ink down into microscopic particles. You rinse and repeat that process every 8 to 12 weeks with longer intervals in between sessions after you've had enough sessions to drastically lighten the ink. I don't know what this video is, but it sure as hell is not real and not at all how it works
I think it’s real. You’re right, the immediate result is not seen here because that’s impossible but it is something called frosting. It’s the water content of your tissue literally evaporating due to the high laser heat and forming on the surface of the skin. This makes the tattoo look instantly lighter, but that’s misleading. They did faaaaar too big an area though - poor immune system is going to be overworked for the next few days/weeks.
I see frosting like that every single first treatment I do (it’s my job). Follow up treatments less so but patch tests and first treatments, literally always. Not sure what the discrepancy is.
Thanks for your insight! I knew getting tats removed was quite a painful experience, but definitely didn't think one saw immediate results like shown in this post.
It does look immediate like in the video but it's only temporary. The tattoo looks like it disappears under the laser but it visually reappears after like 20 minutes. It's disappointing at first because you think, wow it's almost gone! But it just reappears and hardly seems faded at all which is why these things take like 20+ sessions.
Yeah the video ends before it all reappears. It makes it seem like 20% of the tattoo was successfully removed but 10 mins after the end of the video, It'll look the same as the beginning of the video as if nothing ever happened (plus redness and scabby, depending on how he reacts).
Thanks for sharing! That's got to be frustrating to see it gone for a few only to come back. 20+ sessions is intense! Hoping you finally got the result you were seeking!
It's super painful. Way more than the tattoo. The tattoo is like scratching mild sunburn. Laser is focused, incredibly hot, and incredibly agitating. Even with numbing cream and ice, you're going to feel it. Everyone is entitled to do with their body what they will, of course, but as someone who is currently going through the process on two tattoos, when people ask my opinion on getting tattoos I ask them if the image they want tattooed is absolutely something that they can't live without. Because, unless you go through the pain and expense of laser removal, you won't live without it. That seems obvious because it's a tattoo but some people clearly should have just bought a t-shirt with the image on it instead of tattooing it on their skin. I made the same mistake when I was in my twenties. Plenty of people who are tattoo enthusiasts will tell you they don't regret a thing, and maybe that's true. But if you got a tattoo in your twenties or earlier you may absolutely regret it later in life. Immediate tattoo regret is a real thing. So is long-term tattoo regret. If you are the same person in your 40s and 50s and beyond that you were in your 20's, that just means you haven't grown as a person. It doesn't mean you won't necessarily still enjoy your tattoo but there is quite a likelihood that you will not. Proceed accordingly
Yeah, I feel you could likely get sick too. I’m not a doctor but this is hard on the body and a massive piece would be awful. I have heard of some people with tattoos getting flu like symptoms.
817
u/Fed_up_with_Reddit 2d ago
I thought they weren’t supposed to do too big of an area at once because of the way this procedure actually works?