A London Startup Is Selling Permanent Stick-On Tattoos—and It Wants to Do Mail Order - Gizmodo

Today’s entry to the ranks of “technologies that are cool in a technical sense but also don’t seem like a particularly great idea” comes from London-based startup CipherX, which describes itself as “a biotech start-up pioneering the next generation of microneedle technology for high-impact products across lifestyle, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical markets.” If you’re wondering exactly what that means, it translates as follows: they’re selling permanent stick-on tattoos! The tattoos use the company’s proprietary “MicroDot Technology™ platform” and come in the form of little patches that are pressed onto your skin for 15 minutes. The application process seems not unlike those temporary tattoos that you apply by pressing them onto your skin and then wetting them with a washcloth, except that in this case, instead of a washcloth, you use an applicator that pushes the patch against your skin, thus forcing the “ultra-fine, microscopic structures (smaller than 1 mm) … to penetrate the upper layers of the skin and deposit pigment.” The phrase “ultra-fine, microscopic structures” seems to be a nice way of saying “tiny needles,” but apparently they’re basically painless: The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed took one for the team by actually getting one of these things, reporting that the application process “felt more like someone had lightly touched my arm with their finger.” Clearly this is excellent news for people with needle phobias and others who have wanted a tattoo but have been unable or unwilling to subject themselves to traditional tattooing. It’s worth pointing out, however, that options are currently pretty limited, both in quantity and in complexity. All the tattoos available so far are basically laid out on a grid, with each filled square corresponding to a single dot—or microdot, I guess—of ink. This means that the results look like very precise stick-and-pokes. The designs available on the CX website lean into this aesthetic, including simple geometric designs (stars, hearts, lines) along with some Wingdings-y items (a musical note, a butterfly, a skull and—for our raver friends—a smiley face). As far as colors, you, well, you can have any color you like, so long as it’s black. All this means that actual tattoo artists shouldn’t worry too much about this technology, despite founder Ferdinand Kohle’s proclamation in a London Tech Week video that “the skill level to apply these tattoos is extremely low… so anyone essentially can be a tattoo artist.” Kohle’s blog on the CipherX site is pretty wild reading, by the way. If you thought that this was just a new way to deliver stick-and-pokes, think again: “Conceptually, a microneedle tattoo reframes tattooing from symbolic inscription to technological embedding,” Kohle writes. “In that sense, a microneedle tattoo isn’t just body art or medical tech—it’s a proto-interface, hinting at futures where interaction, sensing, and expression are literally under the skin.” The blog is big on phrases like “interaction paradigms on skin”—a topic that seems to envisage a future wherein one could get “localized haptic cues” and “thermal feedback” from touching someone’s tattoo, which… the mind boggles—but small on mentions of the artists who have created and applied tattoos for, y’know, ever. In this sense, it embodies a trend that seems endemic in tech people, which is the combination of apparent respect for a given art form (in this case, tattoos) with complete disregard for the people who actually create that art form. In any case, the demographic that’s currently most likely to be worried about CipherX’s offerings is parents of impulsive teens/pre-teens. Perhaps in deference to such concerns, while the company’s tattoos can be ordered online, they can only be applied in person at the company’s London store or one of its roving events “so we can offer a guided experience.” The company is pretty clear on its website that you need ID to prove you’re over 18 before they’ll tattoo you. The site is also clear that staff won’t apply tattoos to the “head, face, neck, hands, wrists, genitalia, elbows, anus, ankles feet”—devastating news for anyone who wanted a smiley face on their asshole. Anyway, CipherX’s desire to keep these out of the hands of lovestruck kids, drunken frat boys, and men experiencing mid-life crises is laudable, but it also feels ultimately futile. This feels like one of those technologies that, sooner or later, will surface in budget, imperfectly imitated forms, resulting in a lot of chastised teens with face tattoos and a lot of very angry parents. The fact that CipherX’s FAQ says that it doesn’t ship tattoos “at the moment” suggests that perhaps they know this as well as anyone, and its representative apparently told The Verge that “it’s planning to sell kits that let you apply the tattoo yourself at home.” All together now: what could possibly go wrong?