DIY Natural Tattoo Removal by Using Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV)

Hello there! I've been looking for any other treatment on Natural Tattoo Removal recently & I've come across to this one website, a guy who already tried to remove his tattoo by using Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) as a main ingredients. 

This guy has been a tattoo collector for over a decade, and am functionally knowledgeable about the medium's technical as well as cultural aspects. He say this right off the bat because he sure that there will be people who wish to point out that what he have done was stupid and dangerous, and they would be correct. So he’s just putting that out there front and center before anyone assumes that his goal here is to present DIY tattoo removal as being a "good idea". Do not try this at home if you don’t have guts.

Natural Tattoo Removal

ABOUT THE TATTOO

Just to pre-empt any questions, he told that the original tattoo was on his left middle finger and intended to look like the symbol used by the band Cloud Cult. Unfortunately this was a terrible tattoo choice as the symbol itself does not translate very well into the medium and the space was far too small for it, anyway. In addition, the application left quite a bit to be desired and so in general it just looked like a shitty tattoo and I had no reservations about sacrificing it to this experiment.

Natural Tattoo Removal

ABOUT APPLE CIDER VINEGAR

This guy has taken organic ACV internally as a probiotic and preventative immune-booster (among other reasons you can read about elsewhere, IE joint health) on a near-daily basis for several years now. As a healthcare provider (current cert: Wilderness EMT) he has used it extensively on friends and patients as a topical treatment for things like sunburn and poison ivy, as well as to remove warts (yes, including genital warts but mostly just on fingers and stuff). His point here being, he have had a working relationship with ACV for many years and have used it to "burn off" warts on people before, so he wasn't just flying blind in seeing what would happen with putting it on a tattoo. He also has a healthcare provider's awareness regarding things like sterility and infection, so keep that in mind.

READ MORE ABOUT DIY BEST WART REMOVER HERE

Now obviously as opposed to a wart, which is a raised area and will soak up and react with ACV before the underlying tissue is too badly affected in most cases, a tattoo is actually under the epidermis and so you'll have to burn through at least a little bit of yourself to get to it. This process was extremely painful, though application methods and schedule will have had a lot to do with that.

Natural Tattoo Removal

THE PROCEDURE (STEPS BY STEPS)

He began by soaking a small piece of gauze or cotton in ACV and taping it over the area, making sure to not have the gauze so saturated that the moisture prevents a firm bandage from holding it in place. At first, you will not feel any burning sensations. He switched the gauze out every couple hours as it dried out so that there was always some ACV soaking into the site. The cumulative effect is what we're after.

After about 24 hours of this (leaving the gauze on overnight) the site becomes pale and clammy, just like if you'd stayed in the bath too long. The tissues are starting to break down from the acidity. At this point I took a sterile needle and "dug out" the dead skin from ONLY directly over top of the ink deposits, leaving the surrounding tissue alone. This allowed further applications of the ACV to penetrate directly to the pigment, as well as encouraging the vinegar to pool in the low channels he had dug out, where it would concentrate its caustic action and minimize damage to the surrounding tissues.

Natural Tattoo Removal

At this point he applied another 24 hours worth of ACV, stopping to further dig out the dead skin over the design as necessary. This is when the process became extremely painful. In order to speed up the removal he would usually push down on the gauze shortly after applying it, adding some pressure to the delivery of the acid and making sure that it was concentrated in the spot he wanted it. The pain is exactly what you might imagine a chemical burn to be like, and to him it was much, much worse than the original application of the tattoo.

When he judged that the burn had gone down to where the ink actually was, he just stopped with the ACV and let the wound heal. Much like in other removal techniques, the ink "rose to the top" of the wound and became the scab, which then peeled off in more or less the exact shape of the tattoo. This is one of the cooler pictures, he think.

Natural Tattoo Removal

Now he had a nasty hollow hole in his finger, which he allowed to heal naturally with a little bit of help from some tincture of Western Red Cedar and Oregon Grape (powerful anti-microbials). The second-to-last photo shows the scar tissue when fully healed, still in the shape of the original design and with some elements that weren't burned off still visible. In particular you can notice that the lower-right hand "leg" of the tattoo seems to fade in and out: this indicates areas where he wasn't diligent enough in digging down to the pigment with the needle, vs. areas where he was.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

This method is much too painful and tedious (changing out the dressing repeatedly over the course of the day) to be seriously used on any large pieces. In addition, the scarification is potentially quite severe as is the risk of infection, and the healing process can be lengthy even though the ACV itself just takes a couple days. He stopped early and got great results, certainly acceptable in terms of just obscuring a small unwanted tattoo. The pieces of it that are still visible, he feel confident could be removed fairly easily by using the same method but with something like a Q-tip for more precise applications. He would not choose to burn the same area again however, as the healing could get progressively more problematic.

Natural Tattoo Removal

In situations where it'd be easy enough to just get a cover-up done, that is obviously going to be your best choice. This form of removal has the potential to leave too much scar tissue to be successfully tattooed over in the future, but as a DIY alternative to expensive laser treatments he would say that it is absolutely viable when it comes to removing small things, slowly.

Hope this has been informative and helpful, even if a lot of you are shaking your heads in exasperation. Or else, you can try other natural tattoo removal suggested in THIS E-BOOK which has been proven the effectiveness. 

BEST OF LUCK GUYS!!