Next time you're mesmerized by a large tattoo on a burly man's bicep, take a moment to question the concentration of pigments buried in his skin. Tattoo pigments are extremely stable, stubbornly insoluble, and involve some strange chemistry. Analyzing them is a challenge, but in the Sept 15 issue of Analytical Chemistry (pp 6440-6447), Wolfgang Baumler and colleagues at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration describe a method to quantitatively extract tattoo pigments and their cleavage products from human skin. Tattoo pigments are not regulated by U.S. and European federal agencies. In the late 1990s, Baumler and colleagues discovered that pigments in tattoos were identical to the pigments used as paints on cars, in printer inks, and in colors on consumer goods. "The reason why people in the tattoo studios are using these dyes or pigments is because [the pigments] are brilliant and chemically very stable," says Baumler. "If you puncture them into the skin, you get a very nice image."
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