At 37, Emilie was fed up. Tired of having to adjust her clothes for the summer, when she had meetings with her clients. Fed up with this drawing that never left her side. For around twenty years, this lawyer at the Paris bar lived with an imposing tribal tattoo on her left shoulder, a 15-centimeter abstract spiral pattern engraved on her skin to celebrate reaching her majority. “I bit my fingers about it, I ended up doing everything to hide it, so I decided to get rid of it,” she says.
Emilie, who does not wish to reveal her last name, then spotted the Clinique des Champs-Elysées, not far from her home, in the beautiful neighborhoods of the capital. A facility where doctors use a picosecond tattoo removal laser, said to leave no scarring. The ray of light produced by the device creates a shock wave in the epidermis, which fragments the tattoo pigments. The light pulses allow the mini-ink particles to pass through the lymphatic system, to be theoretically eliminated in the patient’s urine.
The young lawyer, usually resistant to any medical procedure, was taken care of by a specialized practitioner. “A very professional welcome and supervision”, she boasts after three sessions carried out from the summer of 2023, out of the six prescribed to her. The only detail that upsets her is the cost of this redemption: 1,800 euros for six meetings, while the tribal motif had cost her… 300 euros! “A big budget that is not within everyone’s reach”, she admits.
In France as in the rest of Europe, tattoo removal is experiencing growing success, to say the least. “exponential”, according to establishments that practice it. Out of enthusiasm, naivety or unconsciousness, many tattooed people have marked their skin with the name of a loved one or a fashionable symbol, only to end up in the best case by getting tired of it, in the worst by find it unbearable when it comes to starting a new life or going for a job interview. However, as the number of tattooed people increases over time, the number of repentants increases mechanically. Dizzying, when we know that in Italy, a world record according to various professional estimates, 48% of the population is tattooed, in the United Kingdom 30%, in France only 20%, but this score would have doubled in fifteen years.
So now is the time for the big “tattoo blues”. You still have to be ready to take action. According to the Clinique des Champs-Elysées chain, market leader in France with four of its twenty aesthetic medicine establishments equipped with the latest generation laser (in Paris, Lille, Bordeaux and Rennes), “23% of tattooed people in the world undertake to have their tattoo removed”. This would represent ten million people per year, including three million in Europe, where this colossal market is worth 1.2 billion euros, according to a study by the Strategic Market Research firm in June 2022. A windfall also for the competing Parisian clinic group Ray Studios, which has spread to Lyon and Nantes, but also to Barcelona and Brussels.
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