Made to fade? Two years later my Ephemeral tattoo isn’t so temporary

Six months after I got my Ephemeral, a new brand of tattoo that was designed to disappear in nine to 15 months, it began fading. And then, the fading just kind of stopped. It’s been 25 months since I showed up at the brick-and-mortar shop in Williamsburg and got a Joan Miró monster on my left bicep, and a year past its expiration date I’m still looking at a splotchy, faint outline. Some lines are nearly gone, while others remain darker and more defined, and I’m left with little hope or guidance for the rest of the process.

When I first got my tattoo, I was excited to explain Ephemeral to some sceptical but mostly intrigued admirers of the concept: the tattoo that disappears. But as the fading has been awkward and inconsistent, I grew exhausted and embarrassed when asked what happened to my tattoo, settling on a curt response of “it’s just like that.” 

I’m not alone. On both TikTok and Reddit, you’ll find people bemoaning their long Ephemeral fades. When I got my Ephemeral in March 2021 the projected fade time for the tattoo was one year, but the company has since released a new statement that 30 per cent of tattoos will last longer than one year (that’s one in three tattoos).

Miho Common, 26, wanted an Ephemeral tattoo “in an obvious place and a design [she] didn’t have to think too much about given the temporary nature”. 22 months later she’s annoyed it looks like “the photos they used to show” a five-month fade. “I didn’t commit to this many years,” she says, “but I’m also not upset about it, since I know it will go away at some point.”

Dan Bernstein, co-founder of superfood retailer We Are The New Farmers, has similar feelings. His Ephemeral is an illustration of what microalgae look like under a microscope, and he got it for work 15 months ago. “I don’t regret it as long as it does eventually disappear”. He thinks he probably has a year until it’s fully gone, though he’s not tracking the fade as much as his mother is.

When I first spoke to Ephemeral cofounder Josh Sakhai, two years ago, he was emphatic about the ink that chemical engineers, Brennal Pierre and Vandan Shah, had spent six years researching and developing: “50 plus iterations, 200 plus tattoos, and finally, it feels like we’ve created something the world will really love.” 40 of those tattoos were on himself, 20 on CEO and Tesla alum Jeff Liu, and the rest on the small team who took the brunt of the testing, which turns out to be a very small “clinical trial”.

In an email in regards to this piece, Dr Brennal Pierre told me the longest fade they had in their research and development was 24 months and that they didn’t end up using this ink formula for customers, however, on a Reddit thread Pierre mentions that same tattoo taking 30 months to fade. Further vagaries persist in their messaging. Pierre wrote the ink contains “bioabsorbable polymers the ink breaks down over time into small enough sizes for your body’s immune system to remove.” While some of the components of the ink break down on their own, others “are removed by the body naturally through excretion.” Dr Jesse Boumhela, an immunologist at Mt. Sinai, points out to Dazed that if Ephemeral relies not on the product to disappear but our own body's mechanisms to disappear it, namely the immune system which is a mystic web of its own, “it makes it hard to speculate why it’s taking longer in some people.”

Disappearance is a tricky thing for a tech company to sell. When the web surfaced in the 90s it enticed users with the premise of impermanence and anonymity. Even today, social media’s most popular functions centre around the idea of an ephemeral presence: Instagram Stories, Snapchat, a swipe left on a dating app. As more of our lives moved online, our internet presence – our data – garnered market value, and our anonymity was no longer profitable for tech giants. Suddenly, every second we spent online was surveilled.

The Ephemeral tattoo was sold with the logic of early internet naivete; the desire for impermanence, of being able to chop and change our appearances (and, by extension, our selves). Ephemeral marketed its business to the extremely online, promoting itself through influencers and online journalists like me. They offered those outside of the traditionally counter-culture tattoo world a brief buy-in, an opportunity to visit and see how it feels. A slogan on the website even reads “own what you’re not.” The other language is that of social justice movements, to make their target audience of young Instagram users even more explicit: “move away from binary boundaries”, “take control of your identity”, “break down barriers”, “stand for self-expression.” Meanwhile, they raised millions in funding from Techstar, whose other investments include a polygraph detector app developed by an Israeli security company.

Ephemeral’s slogan is “Regret Nothing”, nodding to people’s lifelong tattoo regrets. While I’m sure some people with Ephemeral tattoos do have regrets (one Instagram commenter calling mine a “dickhead fish with an eye in the asshole” certainly raised some concerns), I wonder what the company’s are. Investing 27 million dollars into opening eight shops around the country and not into more research on their product? Flying too close to the industry disruptor sun?

Hopefully, my tattoo goes away soon. Unsurprising, this whole process has put me off the idea of getting a permanent one. At least with Ephemeral, it’s a pretty nice feeling to know it won’t be there forever, and three years is nothing compared to a whole lifetime (or excruciatingly painful tattoo removal). I suppose this experience has reminded me to yield more caution when it comes to my body – and that it really is impossible to “regret nothing”.

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