When she was 20, Angela Calisti and a friend entered a tattoo shop with the intention of getting matching butterfly markings on their backs. Because the credit-card machine wasn’t working, only Calisti ended up under the needle. And thus began years of regret.
“The day I got the butterfly, I wanted to rid of it,” says Calisti, now a 29-year-old hairstylist in Astoria, Queens.
She’s not alone. Over the past few months, several stars have reportedly been erasing their ink: From Khloé Kardashian, who announced this summer she was removing a back tattoo, to Victoria Beckham (Hebrew words running down her neck) to Eva Longoria and her lower-back cross.
Tattoo rates have skyrocketed in recent years — about 20 percent of Americans now have at least one, up from 13 percent in 2007. With that surge of popularity has come a surge in regret, and a boom in clinics that remove ink using lasers.
Julie Zuckerman, vice president of Manhattan’s Schweiger Dermatology Group, reports her office used to do 10 consultations a week three years ago; now they’re at 100.
Calisti started going to Schweiger about a year and a half ago to have her butterfly tat, and another on her shoulder of a fairy, erased. Having undergone six sessions, the ink has faded considerably. She expects her skin to be clear after two more.
The Laser & Skin Surgery Center of New York in Murray Hill has seen a 25 percent increase in the past year alone, director Dr. Roy Geronemus says.
“Laser technology has been common since 1990,” he says. “But it was a slower process then. There were many colors we could not effectively treat until the past two years.”
Removal costs between $200 and $500 a session, depending on the size of the design, and most tattoos require several appointments. But it previously required multiple visits spread over eight months to erase a small tattoo — and that can now be condensed into a single session, Zuckerman says.
That’s good news for a generation treating tattoos as temporary.
Ashani Rivers, 24 and studying chemical engineering at NYU, is having the New York Dermatology Group undo what she calls a “not mature” decision: the Ms. Pac-Man symbols she had inked on the backs of her ankles at 18.
How will she celebrate?
By getting a Sanskrit tattoo on a visit to Thailand next January.
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