Celebrity Tattoo Artist Bang Bang Creates Light-Activated Disappearing Ink: It's 'Brain-Breaking' (Exclusive) (2024)

Imagine having a tattoo you could turn on and off whenever you wanted? Well, it's now a reality (and no, we're not living in an episode of Black Mirror!)

There have been tattoos on the market that are semi-permanent, and of course, everyone’s played with temporary tattoos at some point in their lives, but none of those compare to permanently inking your body in a way that will always be there but can be hidden at times when you want it to be.

Picture this: You get a tattoo that you love but you want to make it disappear because you’re visiting your grandma who hates tattoos. Rather than put on another layer of clothes, what if you could simply make the ink disappear?

Celebrity tattoo artist Keith “Bang Bang” McCurdy, along with a large team that includes University of Colorado professor of mechanical engineering Carson Bruns, scientists at HYPRSKN and board-certified dermatologists, created Magic Ink, which allows you to do exactly that.

“Magic Ink is a safe, biocompatible tattoo ink that you can control using different lights,” New York City-based Bang Bang tells PEOPLE exclusively. “That is the simplest way to put it. It’s made with medical-grade polymers, and once you’ve been tattooed, you can turn the ink on and off with a light.”

Yes, you read that correctly — you can literally make your tattoo disappear and reappear with a simple light pen that you shine onto your skin, à la disappearing ink that we would write secret messages to our friends with in the 1990s.

Bang Bang admits that a lot of the science behind Magic Ink is “brain-breaking” when it comes to explaining it to consumers, but the technology of how it all comes together is important to understand, because of how fascinating it all is and because of the level of safety involved.

To keep the brain-melting to a minimum, let’s break it down more simply.

How Does Magic Ink Work?

Magic Ink, which is currently only being offered in red, is activated by light after it's been tattooed into your skin.

The ink is turned on and off with UV light, but not any kind of UV light that's going to be damaging to your skin. That's why the team was built with scientists and dermatologists, to ensure every part of this process was safe from the inside out.

Bang Bang says it was a "process" to find the exact right wavelength — or nanometer — of UV light to turn the tattoo on and off, because it affects how quickly the reaction happens.

"It was a balancing act, because it could have been a slow process of sitting under a light and almost baking your skin, but we didn't want that," he says. "This way, it's like a magic trick. On. Off."

In short, one wavelength of UV light reacts with the ink under your skin to make it visible, while a different wavelength of UV light reacts with the ink to make it disappear again. You use a light pen that you're given when you get your tattoo to activate it and deactivate it, which you can see in the videos here.

Why Red?

Bang Bang, who tattoos at his own studio called Bang Bang in New York City, made the judgment call to start with red ink because he felt like it was the right complement to black. He didn't want to replace black, he wanted a color to dance with it.

"It was about marrying Magic Ink to standard tattoo ink, and I think red does it best, so that's why I picked it," he says. "That said, some people will use Magic Ink independently of standard tattoo inks, and that's cool too. Everybody is welcome."

It's not necessarily where he and the team started, though, with colors, and it's certainly not the end. He's still testing blue (he currently has his own blue Magic Ink tattoo) and yellow will come next. Once they have the three primary colors, the possibilities become endless.

"We made a bunch of batches that were terrible," he says of where the process for color started. "Some didn't work well in skin, some weren't compatible with our tattoo needles or were just difficult to put maximum particle load with minimum damage. I probably have 50 of these in varying formulas tattooed in me, as do the other founders until we got to one that we decided felt and acted like tattoo ink."

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up to date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Will the Tattoos Degrade Over Time?

When you look at a tattoo that someone has had for decades, it — understandably — looks very different from how it did the day the person got it. That’s because your body breaks down the ink once it comes in contact with it. Though Bang Bang and the HYPRSKN team haven’t had decades to test Magic Ink yet, they have cycled tattoos on skin 10,000 times thus far, and it showed no distinct degradation.

“Everything dies in time,” Bang Bang explains. “But we did 10,000 tests, which we thought was about equal to 30 or so years of activating and deactivating the tattoo. Next we’ll do 50,000 tests. We've only truly had it in skin for five years and they still work. We'll learn more as we go, but all we can do is accelerated study testing.”

Leaving it activated — or visible — won’t make it degrade faster either. It simply just changes the appearance of your tattoo.

“This ink works like a door,” Bang Bang explains to PEOPLE. “So if you give it UV light, the door opens and you can see into the party. And if you give it white light, the door will close. You just are choosing, essentially, the structure of the particle. Is the door open or is the door closed? But it doesn't have any behavioral change and it doesn't prefer either way.”

How Safe Is It?

Bang Bang stresses multiple times while explaining Magic Ink that it's extremely safe, as is any good tattoo if you're going to a reputable tattoo artist and studio. Magic Ink, at the forefront of modern tattooing, may just be the "safest tattoo ink out there," Bang Bang says.

Because Magic Ink is made with medical-grade ingredients — polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) — it's highly regulated. It's the same polymer found in dermal fillers, and it's very biocompatible. The ink is inside these polymers, and because the polymers are so uniform, the ink won't break down like it typically does with standard tattoo ink. That means there's less of a chance for ink to migrate under your skin and cause reactions.

HYPRSKN offers a full explanation of the safety precautions the team has taken on testing Magic Ink, and Bang Bang also notes that all of the tattoos they did during the testing phase were overseen by a board-certified dermatologist, and every single one was deemed safe, successful and efficacious.

Does It Hurt?

A Magic Ink tattoo feels the same as any other tattoo and it heals the same as any other tattoo. If you closed your eyes while an artist was putting a Magic Ink tattoo into your skin, you wouldn't know it was any different from a standard tattoo, despite it being made of different ink.

Where you'll see a slight difference, Bang Bang says, is in the immediate appearance after the Magic Ink tattoo is completed. When a standard tattoo is completed, it's the freshest and most beautiful it'll ever be. That's not the case with Magic Ink.

"You actually have to heal the tattoo before it is its most incredible," he says. "You have to fully rejuvenate and heal the skin. It's delayed satisfaction. It almost looks like a scratch when it's first completed. Then through the healing process, it looks like a normal tattoo, then in two weeks, two months, six months, as your skin rejuvenates, Magic Ink becomes completely invisible, and then the fun happens."

As for using the light to activate or deactivate the ink, that doesn't hurt either. It's not hot, you won't feel any burning on your skin or below your skin. You won't feel anything at all as the ink activates. There is nothing scary or unsafe about this process. But if you think getting a regular tattoo hurts, getting a Magic Ink tattoo will also hurt. It is a needle, after all!

Where Can I Get a Magic Ink Tattoo and How Much Does It Cost?

Bang Bang and his team of artists were the first to do Magic Ink tattoos but more artists around the world are being trained to use the ink. Because it behaves as standard tattoo ink, it should catch on, but the team behind it wants to ensure that all artists using it understand how it works before they start tattooing with it.

About 15 countries are represented, Bang Bang says, in this first phase of artists who are being trained to use Magic Ink. You can find an artist doing Magic Ink tattoos here. The prices will vary based on the artist.

Bang Bang, who has an elite clientele in New York that includes the likes of Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Justin Bieber and many more — and who recently tattooed Dua Lipa on Late Night with Seth Meyers — has already done plenty of Magic Ink tattoos and was doing them long before the official announcement. He says he's now looking forward to the next steps in modern tattooing and the most "fun things" he can "dream up" along the way.