A while back, in January I believe, I did a blog about home tattoo removal that basically laid out what should be obvious to anyone with more than three functioning brain cells. Home tattoo removal is about as smart as do it yourself gallbladder surgery, and the greedy assholes who are promoting their “Home Tattoo Removal” kits are the exact same ilk as the old west Medicine Show con artists that plagued the frontier. About as honest, too.
Terilyn, one of our fellow bloggers, commented that the latest site in this exercise in stupidity was a “fake site”. A joke that was not intended to be taken seriously. Sorry, hun, but I have recently found out that this crap is not a joke. It is a deadly serious attempt to relieve tattoo regret customers of vast amounts of their hard earned cash. Oh, yeah, and to fuck up their skin in the process.
The wishful thinking product I am referring to here is WreckingBalm®, a sideshow con game product if there ever was one. The link goes straight to their “How Retching Balm Works” site. If the background reminds you of a vaudeville stage motif, that should tell you something! I’ll give you the plain speech translation to their slick, sucker presentation.
Introducing Doc Wilson’s WreckingBalm® No.3 for tattoo removal – a unique, devastatingly effective tattoo fade – removal system that is unlike anything ever seen from the far-reaching corners of the earth.
There is only one way to “fade” a tattoo….Laser Surgery! All other methods of tattoo removal require a form of dermabrasion. That is the sanding off of the layers of the skin to remove the tattoo. A practice that has been in use in every corner of the Earth. In fact this is what they are having you do to “fade” the tattoo, as they later admit in a spin doctor style.
Doc Talk: The secret of WreckingBalm® is the breakdown of ink injected skin cells and the utilization of your skin’s natural ability to heal and regenerate itself with healthy, new, ink-free skin cells.
The ability of the skin to form scar tissue after you sand the tattoo off in layers with their home dermabrasion sander.
Doc Wilson has produced a simple 3-step process that just takes 3 minutes every other day. This unique system safely combines three technologies and two simple methods of skin exfoliation and removal…The first uses an FDA-approved mechanical hand-held medical device that gently, but effectively, removes the upper layers of the epidermis
In other words, just like I said, the first step is dermabrasion. The truth is you are actually sanding the tattoo off using their sander!
The second step uses a chemical serum that penetrates deep into the underlying lower layers, breaking up the cellular matrix in which the ink pigments are imbedded.
If this shit penetrates the skin deeply to break up the ink, then what the Hell do you have to sand your skin for? Either this crap is nothing more than a mild acid, like the old Tatex® stuff that the FDA pulled off the market after it messed up a whole lot of people, or it’s nothing more than an antibacterial cream to help the skin heal.
In that case you’d be just as well off with a piece of fine sandpaper and a tube of Neosporin®…..it would cost you a lot less than they charge, too. Hopefully, you not dumb enough to try that either.
It takes 4 to 6 weeks for cells to naturally regenerate and complete one cycle.
Of course it takes several weeks for the sanded skin to heal! Since it takes several cycles for this garbage to fully “fade” the tattoo, you should now be wondering about that 3 minute every other day claim they made at the start. So, which is it?
I have a bigger news flash for you. Sand any part of you tattoo every day and in several weeks it will “fade”. It will also leave a nice smooth, but noticeable, scar in it’s place. I’ll guarantee it.
So, what brought this back up? A couple days ago I was driving along, listening to my favorite Rock station when a commercial for “Retching Balm” came on. This shit is not a joke, nor a parody site. It is another attempt to wring hard cash out of people who have tattoo regret and are too poor to have laser removal done. In short it is dangerous bullshit that will cost you more than you should be willing to pay.
Look, the honest truth is that the safest and least scaring way to remove a tattoo is laser removal done by a licensed dermatologist. The only other good option is to have the offending tattoo covered up with a killer design you can be proud of. Falling for this Snake Oil pitch is as much of a mistake as the choice that got you the bad tattoo in the first place. If not a worse one.
Think before you ink, Gang. And for God’s sake; don’t try this shit at home!