Why are celebrities removing their tattoos – and should you, too? 50 Cent, Mark Wahlberg, Pete Davidson and Colin Farrell are all ditching their ink

South China Morning Post

01-04-2025

When
Pete Davidson appeared in a fashion brand ad campaign last month, one aspect of his appearance was glaring: the absence of his 200 tattoos. The actor had spent some US$200,000 getting them 'burned off', as he's put it, in a process he has described as 'horrible'. But perhaps he is ahead of the curve. As he noted: five years ago, when he first pondered the move, 'everybody was getting
tattoos '.
He's not wrong. Naturally cultural attitudes to tattoos vary around the world, but polling over recent years has suggested almost a third of Americans now have a tattoo, a quarter of Brits, and a fifth of Australians. In China's bigger metropolitan centres, tattoos are commonplace. Are we at peak tattoo and now seeing a counter trend?
Colin Farrell , 50 Cent and Mark Wahlberg are among some of the more heavily tattooed celebrities who have had some of theirs removed over more recent years. In Wahlberg's case, for the sake of 'maturity'.
Ariana Grande at the Oscars, in March. Photo: FilmMagic
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'But has the tattoo become mainstream? I don't think so,' says Daidai Lee of Hong Kong's Mofo Tattoo. 'Certainly tattoos are now more mainstream and more people of all ages are getting them. But many parts of the world, Hong Kong included, remain quite traditional where a tattoo is still considered to be 'alternative' and especially [problematic] in some careers like banking or teaching.'
Indeed, according to Dr Matt Lodder, a tattoo historian with the University of Essex and author of Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art, their popularity has always gone through generational peaks and troughs.
'There is the sense now that tattooing is over-saturated, especially given the increased social acceptance of tattoos and their increased visibility too,' he says. 'There are definitely fewer people obsessed with tattoos now [as the internet normalises once underground subcultures ever faster]. Of course, tattoos are also expensive in an era when people have less money. And then there is the generational shift – as ever, younger people have never wanted to look like their dads and mums.'
Justin Bieber. Photo: @justinbieber/Instagram
The tattoo removal industry is getting both larger – valued at US$4.3 billion globally in 2021, and expected to be worth almost triple that by the end of the decade – and more sophisticated. The latest systems use high stability pico lasers – developed specifically for tattoo removal – which break up the ink by pulsing a laser under the skin for just a fraction of a second, using different wavelengths to disrupt different colours. Navy blue is the most resistant, FYI.
According to Kevin Chua, of Singapore's Dr Kevin Chua Medical & Aesthetics, such systems are unlikely to advance much further any time soon. That is both good news – he says they can already remove 100 per cent of a tattoo anyway – and bad, 'because it's not a pleasurable experience and can hurt more than getting the original tattoo did', he says. Multiple sessions over many months are often required – so the process is not cheap either.
'Patients often don't tend to want a tattoo removed for reasons of aesthetics – more because they got it on the spur of the moment in the first place, because it holds painful memories for them, even because it has affected their job hunting,' says Chua, who also works with the Singapore Anti-Narcotics Association to help ex-offenders remove gang-related tattoos. 'But since tattoo fashions change so fast now, I think we can only expect to get busier over coming years.'