Plastic Surgery: Laserasing Tattoos

Conventional plastic surgery to remove tattoos takes a long time and often leaves unsightly scars. But using laser beams, a team of University of Cincinnati doctors have developed a technique that literally explodes tattoo dyes out of skin, with less pain and often less scarring.

Like ordinary light, the powerful coherent beam of the laser passes relatively unobstructed through transparent skin, giving up little of its energy in the form of heat. When it hits the colored dye particles beneath the surface of the skin, it is absorbed and converted into intense heat that instantaneously vaporizes the particles. The resulting plume of hot vapor bursts through the surface of the skin above the tattoo, charring and crusting it. In most of the 116 cases treated in the past three years at the university's laser laboratory, the seared areas of skin have healed rapidly and cleanly, leaving white, "cosmetically acceptable" scars behind.

Suntanned and Negro skins tended to absorb more heat energy because of their darker hues, and are more severely damaged and scarred over larger areas than lighter skins. Even when treating lighter skins, the researchers found, it is best to apply titanium dioxide ointment; the white ointment protects untattooed skin from damage.

The group, led by Dermatologist Leon Goldman, stressed in a recent issue of the A.M.A. Journal that laserasing surgery is still too untried to be used routinely in the treatment of tattoos. But preliminary results are so promising that the technique may be used to treat soldiers who are literally tattooed when explosions implant tiny fragments and dirt beneath their skins.