Scientists Concerned About Potential Carcinogens in Your Tattoos

New research has found that some tattoo ink may contain toxic chemicals that are not on the ingredient list.

John Swierk, the study's principal investigator, said that they found something that gave them pause every time they looked at the ink.

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre published a report in 2016 that warned about the potential for toxic chemicals in tattoo ink.

There hadn't been a lot of public data for tattoo artists about which brands to avoid.

Swierk's study came in. The assistant chemistry professor and his students interviewed tattoo artists to find out how much they knew about the chemicals in their preferred brands, and found that most of the artists had no idea what chemicals were in their preferred brands.

According to the press release presented this week at the American Chemical Society's annual conference, tattoo ink is made up of pigments and a carrier solution, which is used to make the ink colors moresoluble and transfer them to the middle layer of skin.

Swierk and his team used a variety of high tech methods to make some troubling findings.

Many of the others contained azo, a common pigment type, and one ink that did not have it listed in its ingredients was found to contain azo as well. According to the new research, azo can degrade into a different nitrogen-based compound that is potentially cancer-causing over time.

Swierk said that half of the 16 pigments studied had particles small enough that they could cause harm.

Swierk and his team have begun to put their findings on a website that will help artists and people who get tattoos learn more about what potentially harmful chemicals may be in the ink they're putting into their skin.

Even though the tattoo artists interviewed in the study were unaware of what was in their ink even when ingredient labels were present, there's a high chance that such a resource may be wasted.

Maybe the research will act as an additional source of information for the tattoo industry at some point in the future.

What's in tattoo ink?

A man gets a tattoo created by a neural network.