Last week I posted about vegan ink, the cruelty free and perhaps healthier alternative to regular tattoo ink. Well, despite angering at least one of you with that post, I believe it did brush on the topic of the need to either introduce newer, stricter laws on what is permitted as ingredients in tattoo ink, or to make displaying the ink ingredients on the bottle law.
It’s when I see news such as this from Germany that the ingredients of tattoo ink suddenly starts to become more of a pressing issue with me. A recent study in Karlsruhe, Germany has discovered that some tattoo inks contain “health damaging substances which can cause cancer.”
‘Chemists in Karlsruhe, Germany, have presented results of a study by the German Chemical and Veterinary investigations office showing that tattoo ink contains health damaging substances which can cause cancer.
One third of the 38 tattoo colours tested contained banned substances, which are dangerous to health. In some cases they even contained substances which are usually found only in car paint.’
How reliable of a study this is remains to be seen, but I think I can speak for most people when I say that Cancer and car paint are two features of tattoo ink that I am not all that excited about. If this is the sort of study that they are getting in Europe, what about the ink that is used in other parts of the world like North America? Is it the same? Better? Or even worse? Whatever it is, one thing is for certain: it’s time that laws begin to change and open up much, much wider in order to accommodate the issues surrounding tattoo.