Temporary tattoos² have been around for a long time, but as any inking enthusiast³ would agree, they're nothing compared to the real deal. 

 

很早以前就有临时纹身这个东西了，但是正如墨水纹身爱好者所言，比起真正的纹身，临时纹身根本不值一提。

 

And yet, there are times when tattoos don't end up like you wanted them to, or you just get bored with them after a while. In such cases, getting a tattoo¹ removed involves laser treatments that are both expensive and painful. But not anymore. It might soon be possible to temporarily get a permanent tattoo, thanks to this new type of tattoo ink developed by a group of engineering students.

 

The special ink has a huge advantage over regular tattoo ink - it can be removed from your skin through an extraordinarily⁴ simple and inexpensive process. You simply visit your tattoo artist and have them trace over the tattoo with a removal solution. Voila! It's all gone. Or, you can just erase⁵ the part of it that you don't like and turn it into a whole new artwork. The choice is yours.

 

The product is named 'Ephemeral', after the team of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering students who took part in the recent $200,000 Entrepreneurs Challenge held by NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The team comprised of five School of Engineering students and a sixth one from Stern won the grand prize of $75,000 for their unique invention.

 

"Ephemeral was born through a personal experience of mine," said Seung Shin, one of the team members. "Ever since I was young, I was always interested in tattoos but my parents were extremely against it mostly because of its permanence." Shin later went on to get a tattoo anyway, but eventually had it removed as well. "It was the worst experience of my life," he said. "It was extremely painful, ineffective, and costly⁶." The experience got him thinking about simpler methods of tattoo removal, and ultimately brought the idea to fruition during the competition. The trick was to reduce the size of the ink molecules⁷, making it easier to simply wipe away.

 

"Tattoo inks today are permanent because of the fact that the dye molecules are too big for your body's immune system to take away," explained Anthony Lam, another team member. "By using smaller molecules, we've encapsulated them inside this spherical⁸ structure that's big enough that your immune system doesn't take it away. But when you remove it, it essentially⁹ eats away one of the components¹⁰ and the dye molecules are flushed out."

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