Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed?

What’s really happening under the laser during tattoo removal is much more complex and elegant than it literally sounds (and smells). These days, the best-in-class lasers for the procedure are five-to-six-figure picosecond laser machines, named for the duration of time it takes to heat the ink in your skin—picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. In that time, the laser targets the pigment in the ink, heating it to a temperature it cannot sustain. (If you point a calibrated picosecond…