This is Tattoo Overview, and last time, on our last episode we talked a little bit about how
ink really gets in the skin. We talked about how it works through a vacuum rather than pressing
ink in the skin. So continuing with that line of thought let's dive into how tattoos age in
the skin. We all know that a fresh tattoo looks beautiful and the colors all look exactly like
they do when you pour them out of the tube into the ink cap and everything is shiny and
new but then as the tattoo ages when it comes back healed very rarely do the healed colors look like
the fresh color looked. So, to understand what's actually happening when we're looking at healed
and aged tattoos and how we can make better decisions in designing our tattoos let's take
the path of a photon of light and follow it as it travels through the skin, hits the particle of ink,
and then travels back to our eye just so we get a better understanding of what's actually happening
I'm a photon of light... I'm travelling... How fast am I traveling?
Yeah, you're traveling at the speed of light... LOL!
Alright, I'm a photon of light, Traveling at the speed of light
and I am hitting skin traveling towards a tattoo, What do I encounter?
Okay, so the first thing is your
going to hit the oils of the skin, which is going to create some refraction, and also the moisture
of the skin. So, some of the light will refract, the refracting light is going to be absorbed
by all of the surrounding cells at the skin which are translucent so if you think about a glass of
water when you shoot a flashlight through the glass you can see the light bend the index of
refraction inside of the glass. So, that happens all throughout the translucent skin cells and when
it hits another cell it refracts more, and refracts more, and refracts more so it actually creates
a glowing effect. So, if you imagine the light having a force each time that it travels deeper,
and deeper, and deeper, into the skin it loses some energy until it hits the tattoo pigment and then
it makes its way back up or it loses more, and more, and more energy. So, the pathway from the photon
itself, or the source, or the receptor your eyeball, all the way through the skin, all the way back out
you're gonna have some energy loss and the energy loss is measured in wavelengths of light or colors
of light because wavelengths translate into colors. So, you can actually calculate how much
or what colors of light will be absorbed by the skin and then knowing what colors of light will
be absorbed by the skin gives you a very precise measurement represented by the colors that are
received by your eye ball.
So, the value and color of the skin cells themselves have an effect on how quickly those wavelengths fall out, or no?
yeah they do so there's a base level that you
can see, everybody shares. So, you can calculate that... There's wavelengths of light that will be absorbed
by skin irregardless of your skin tone and then you have to start adding on the cell diameters.
As people get darker the cells that make our skin look darker actually get much, much bigger.
The cells of a darker-skinned person are physically larger than the cells in my skin?
Yes, physically larger, and the refraction becomes different on those and as it refracts it absorbs more or less light.
Alright, so let me ask you about a tattoo that I did several years ago on a young girl. Her
complexion was kind of an olive color and I did a lot of water and I used kind of a bright teal
or turquoise going down into like a mint green on the lighter side in her skin. And, it looked fantastic
when it was fresh and I saw her later on and it was dingy for lack of a better term... and kind of
splotchy. I know that the saturation was solid but it kind of read as splotchy... why did that happen?
The layers of skin as they heal up don't distribute themselves evenly. It's like a static pattern and
the trick is, is to say what is the base skin tone of this person and what wave lengths of
light would be on the other side, essentially, of a color wheel. Because, those are the ones that are going to
give more of a problem. The complementary color... Complementary colors. Yep, Absolutely.
The next thing you need to ask yourself, the human skin will shift either to the blue side or to the
red side, and is this person shifting blue or red, and her situation she was shifting red so that's
where you had the interference in the teal blue. So, that means that as the wavelengths of light go
down you'll know what the absorption rate is. The wavelengths of light that are coming back are half
of that so the complementary interference will actually be double the amount. So, the illusion
is, is that you have something that's splotchy just because the cells that are refracting all those
photons of light are actually more sensitive to that base color, that complementary color.
So, it's... it's similar to if I were mixing paint or mixing inks and I mixed complementaries how they
neutralize each other in the... in the tube or on the paintbrush, right?
Yeah, what makes it tricky is you have to know what that initial absorption is. 0:05:16.360,1193:02:47.295 So, the initial absorption of all human skin,
if you look at it there's spikes. There's one that happens on the yellow side and there's
this big area of green light that gets absorbed, and then you have a little spike on the blue side.
So, the safest colors are gonna be the red, but that doesn't mean that I'm gonna be able to see all of
the reds, which is sort of misleading. It just means that the furthest end of the red, which is a really
narrow band, is going to come back pretty clear on human skin, but the dangerous bits are gonna
be around the blue and the green area. Again, you have to look at that persons base pigmentation
but if you're just going to say in general terms there would be that area, that greenish area
is the one that you have to worry about. But, it's going to be different for each color, so you have
to say, well how much green is in that color, or how close does it shift to the green in relationship
to the base tone.
It sounds like it's getting pretty scientific and kind of difficult
for tattooers to perceive just by glancing at someone. Or, you know.... especially when you're... the temperature of
the light in your studio could affect all this. Is there... are there any tools or is there any kind
of... any approach that would help tattooers make those decisions?
Definitely! 3D Rendering applications, and all the great technological tools
that people have for video game technology and
visualization. Those are all based on physics. So, those physics engines are really good ways to try
to figure some of this stuff out without having to run trials on human beings.
The answers will come back for this skin-type group. These colors, or this color, as appropriate. Or, it's gonna read
the best really, under all the different lighting conditions including full spectra sunlight and
you can make better decisions that way. So, one color does not fit all skin tones but
I think all tattooers know... but, the reason why, and what the advantages and the disadvantages
are... that's where it becomes a little bit tricky So, you can say, I've got someone who's very pale
and someone who's olivey and there's a really big difference in between the two so
you have, you know, optimal color selections for each one of those skin types.
Does it make sense to limit color palettes? Are there ideal color palettes for each specific skin tone?
Can you simplify those things or is it super complex?
It's complex but the great thing is you can
compute it, so computers can help you discover the answer. The trick is to get everybody to have a standard
way to classify skin types. Assuming that you can get all tattooers to agree or adopt skin type
color index then you'll end up with something like six to seven colors that'll be the optimal
colors that'll work in tattooing. They'll read the best, they'll be very predictable. That doesn't limit
the artist because you can still mix those colors and go a little warmer a little cooler but you'll
know those are your anchor points and you'll have a much more limited color palette, but a
much more predictable color palette.
Are the six colors different depending on your skin tone?
Six distinct hues and then the values can be augmented. The black and the white would be
neutral so you'd have the blacks and the whites separate from the six, but six distinct hues.
Okay, so, a lot of tattooers are gonna be caught off guard by that because so many of us use these
giant color palettes with, you know, nine peaches and four greens, but what you're saying essentially
is that all of those things wash out over time and the six ideal colors will stand the test
of time and these other things maybe will not. Can you prove that?
We can prove it by taking
either an existing tattoo and the color of the tattoo, running it through a computer simulation, and then
comparing the two results. That's the easiest way to do it. We can generate some of those images, we
can put them out there for tattoo artists to look and compare with their healed results.
So, in a... like, in a practical application could you photograph the client and run kind of a predictive scenario?
Yeah, we can do that and we can age it into the future so I can say at year one it looks like
this, at year two it looks like this, but yeah, you can get very predictable results that way.
Are there any ways to amplify that healed wavelength of light?
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