Tattoo MD Medispa now carries .4 ml Juvederm syringes.  The standard size of Juvederm is .8 ml and is a sufficient amount to treat nasolabial folds.  Enough may be left over after treatment to allow for a little lip augmentation as well.   Or the whole syringe could be used for lips alone.  The advantage of the .4 ml syringe is the ability to use a smaller amount of filler for certain areas, such as subtle lip augmentation or treating marionette lines (next to the chin).  It’s also excellent for touch-ups when you don’t wish to purchase a full .8 ml syringe.

Due to it’s smaller size, the .4 ml syringe is priced at $350 vs. the .8 ml syringe, priced at $550.  For those of you that have never tried injectable hyaluronic acid fillers before but have been thinking about it, the .4 ml syringe of Juvederm is an excellent way to give it a try.  If you are interested in a free consultation, please call Tattoo MD Medispa at 310-312-1231 or contact us by email!

When you have a tattoo that you want to get rid of, you may want to get treatments as close together as possible.  It is possible to speed up how quickly a tattoo is removed by doing treatments more frequently than the recommended 4-6 weeks.  However, doing that would cause you to need additional treatments and increase the total cost of your tattoo removal.  The greatest amount of fading does occur in the first several weeks after your laser tattoo removal.  Additional fading continues to occur after that but decreases with time.  So you could even wait longer than 6 weeks between treatments, but it may save you only a little in cost, at the expense of stretching out your treatments.  In our experience at Tattoo MD, 5-6 weeks is the optimal time interval that takes into account cost-effectiveness and time.

One alternative technique attempted for tattoo removal is to re-tattoo over a previously tattooed area with saline or a skin-colored pigment.  The idea is to try to push the ink in the upper layers of skin deeper and hopefully out of visibility.  If ink is then placed over this, it is used more or less as a skin-tone cover-up tattoo.  A similar technique claims to employ chemicals that “bind” the pre-existing tattoo pigments and somehow take them away.

Unfortunately, there are serious theoretical and practical problems with all these methods.   In the saline method, the main way that it works is by creating a wound over the previous tattoo. By repetitively re-tattooing the area with a pigment-less needle, a broad wound is formed.  The resulting scar tissue contains ink mixed with it, but more importantly, causes a textural and color change of that skin permanently.  Removing a tattoo is quite easy by comparison to removing that kind of scar.  If the re-tattooing places flesh-toned ink over a darker tattoo, it will only work if a severe wound is created.  As you may guess, you can’t tattoo over a darker tattoo with a lighter pigment.  You’ll still have a dark tattoo mixed with a lighter one.  The older dark ink has to be pushed into the skin.  So again, there is scarring, covered by flesh-toned ink, which looks nothing like normal skin.

Finally, there is the binding-agent re-tattooing technique.  Although it sounds promising, at Tattoo MD, we are seeing some patients that have had this done for a few treatments.  It also tends to result in scarring and unsatisfactory tattoo removal.

Re-tattooing techniques of tattoo removal are not published in any peer-reviewed medical journals and have not been subjected to the rigorous testing required of FDA-approved devices, such as q-switched lasers.  At this time, we are not offering these alternative techniques due to the incomplete tattoo removal results, along with the disadvantage of severe scarring.