{"id":60978,"date":"2019-05-14T03:26:25","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T03:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thefastfashion.com\/?p=60978"},"modified":"2019-05-14T03:26:25","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T03:26:25","slug":"costly-face-tattoo-removals-rise-regret-sets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thefastfashion.com\/?p=60978","title":{"rendered":"Costly face tattoo removals on the rise as regret sets in"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mauricio Arias wears his past on his face: 11 tattoos cover his skin from his eyelids to his cheeks, down to his neck.<\/p>\n<p>Images like a bloodied knife and brass knuckles tell the story of a five-year period of his life plagued by depression and drug addiction \u2014 not exactly the first thing he wants prospective employers to see.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs soon as I walk in for a job interview, they\u2019re gonna think, \u2018Who\u2019s this guy trying to get a job looking like that?\u2019 \u201d says the Queens resident, 30. \u201cI feel trapped.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So, between getting his degree, working full time in construction, and going to church several days a week, Arias, who is now five years sober, is in the middle of getting his face, neck and hand tattoos removed with lasers. The painful procedures, which will span six sessions (he\u2019s already undergone two), will eventually get him to a point where the first thing people see isn\u2019t a reminder of his dark history.<\/p>\n<div class=\"e3lan e3lan-in-post1\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"e3lan e3lan-in-post2\"><p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong><em>Adv<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bagfactory.com.hk\/216\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Sun Winning Ind Co<\/strong><\/span><\/a>: Manufacture of Canvas Bag, Recycle Bad in China<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theunitravel.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TheUniTravel.com<\/a><\/strong><\/span> : Find the latest\u00a0<em>travel<\/em>\u00a0and tourism\u00a0<em>news<\/em>\u00a0from around the world. Stay informed with\u00a0<em>travel news<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>updates<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cYou don\u2019t know how much I think about that day,\u201d Arias says. \u201cI\u2019m gonna cry like a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Face tattoos are making a comeback with celebrities like Wiz Khalifa and Post Malone. But they\u2019re not exactly trendy for people like Arias or former inmate Paul Algarin, a North Carolina man who made headlines last week after Kim Kardashian \u2014 now a criminal justice advocate \u2014&nbsp;brought her doctor to him&nbsp;to begin removing his face tattoos.<\/p>\n<p>For some people, erasing their ink, and the bad memories associated with it, can be the final, \u201cliberating\u201d step of turning their lives around, says Jeff Garnett. He is the co-owner of the tattoo-removal company Clean Slate Laser, which has locations in New York and New Jersey.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve all made mistakes, but our mistakes aren\u2019t always the first thing people see and judge us by,\u201d says Garnett, who is donating six sessions of tattoo removal to Arias. (They usually cost around $400 per session.)<\/p>\n<p>Although clients with face tattoos account for only about 5 percent of his business, \u201cWe are seeing more and more of it,\u201d Garnett says. \u201cFace tattoos have become a bigger part of pop culture \u2014 they\u2019re a little more mainstream now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Clients run the gamut: teens who regret their ink decisions, women with botched microbladed eyebrows and recently released prisoners hoping to find work.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA lot of times, [clients] have prison-gang tattoos, and those are going to get in the way of getting legitimate work,\u201d Garnett says. \u201cAnd if they can\u2019t get a legit job, they might end up back on the wrong track again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Although Arias avoided prison, he felt like he was living in one until recently. His father was murdered when he was 8 years old. His mother brought him and his brothers from Colombia to the US a few years later, but he ended up on the streets of Queens when he was 14. The teen quickly fell into a life of drug addiction. Although he had work as a tattoo artist, he was \u201csurrounded by a lot of negativity, drugs, alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"pullquote left\"><p>\u2018We\u2019ve all made mistakes, but our mistakes aren\u2019t always the first thing people see and judge us by.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When Arias started tattooing his face, he didn\u2019t even think he would live long enough to see the consequences: \u201cI never thought I was going to change. I always thought I would die young or go to jail for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<p>The tattoos were a way for him to show the world what he was made of, he says. He started with smaller tattoos: a cross on one cheek, the Chinese character for \u201cwarrior\u201d on his other. A New York City skyline represented \u201cwhat I\u2019d lived.\u201d The spider-web tattoo on his ear symbolized that \u201cI was trapped in drug addiction, and I wanted to kill myself,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>On one of his lowest days, about five years ago, a tattoo-shop client invited him to church. From there, Arias got clean and began to turn his life around. He quit his job at the tattoo shop and picked up odd, low-paying jobs here and there thanks to his connections at the church.<\/p>\n<p>This Thursday, he\u2019ll graduate from a construction technical school, and then begin studying for his associate\u2019s degree in civil engineering technology. But Arias believes the degrees will be useless as long as he has his face tattoos.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat are the chances anyone is going to want me to manage a million-dollar construction project when they look at me?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>Save for his eyelid tattoos, which require extra medical supervision to remove, Arias should be a clean slate in a year.<\/p>\n<p>He says the removal process is even \u201cmore painful to remove them than to [get] them .\u2009.\u2009. I wake up the next day feeling like someone beat me up.\u201d But he\u2019s not looking for sympathy. He just wants his first impression to be of the man he\u2019s become, not the person he was.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI feel like God changed me inside a lot, but I feel trapped because of my outside,\u201d Arias says. \u201cWhen I remove the tattoos, I\u2019m going to feel free, born again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mauricio Arias wears his past on his face: 11 tattoos cover his skin from his eyelids to his cheeks, down to his neck. Images like a bloodied knife and brass knuckles tell the story of a five-year period of his life plagued by depression and drug addiction \u2014 not exactly the first thing he wants &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[173],"tags":[3783,3784,724,362],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.7.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Costly face tattoo removals on the rise as regret sets in - TheFastFashion.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thefastfashion.com\/?p=60978\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Costly face tattoo removals on the rise as regret sets in - TheFastFashion.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mauricio Arias wears his past on his face: 11 tattoos cover his skin from his eyelids to his cheeks, down to his neck. 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