“The Apple Watch has spoken: It’s time to remove that arm tattoo,” Quentin Fottrell reports for Forbes.
“Some users of Apple Inc.’s latest gadget have found that its heart rate mechanism runs into glitches on sleeve tattoos. Dark, solid colored tattoos appear to be the most likely to puzzle the Apple Watch sensors, according to tests carried out by iMore.com,” Fottrell reports. “Removing a tattoo for an Apple Watch might seem extreme, but it might also be a sign that the time has come to go au naturel again. For most of us, when our life takes us in directions we never expected, our tattoos remain the same. Last year, actress Melanie Griffith filed for divorce from her then-husband Antonio Banderas. But the removal of her heart-shaped tattoo with the first name of her former husband’s first name may have been just as painful. And it’s also part of a lucrative trend: Revenue for tattoo removals has surged 440% to an estimated $75.5 million over the last decade.”
“Most tattoo removals are performed on people in their 30s and 40s, says Michael Kulick, a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon,” Fottrell reports. “‘What was attractive in your 20s is not so attractive in your 30s,’ he says.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, ink – just like your fabric shirtsleeve or anything else – that blocks your Apple Watch’s sensors from seeing your blood vessels means the functions that depend on those sensors will not work. Shocking
If this is the best FUD the anti-Apple losers can concoct against Apple Watch, they’re going to be in for a rough time looking up at an ever-soaring Apple.
Related article:
Ink Different: Tattoos may interfere with some Apple Watch functions – April 30, 2015
Much as I appreciate many of the excellent tattoo artists and incredible quality I’ve seen… Tattoos follow a style sine wave, like a lot of other cultural concepts. We may be watching another fashion trend in transition, with the Watch as a minor motivator.
Hated tattoos before they became uberpopular, truly despise them now. I have always felt that tattoos were for sailors, prison inmates and circus freaks. Not denying there are talented tattoo artists, but they would be just as talented on canvas or some other medium.
Tattoos can’t go out of style fast enough for me.
There’ll be a whole bunch of ugly-lookin’ 80-year olds out there one of these days 😝🙈😱
With strange tattoos. You can never tell what’s going to sag here or wrinkle there.
When I was a wee one, tattoos were all over the place, probably from WWII and the Korean war. I saw them on older gents with the inevitable sagging skin and decided ‘no thank you!’ They can look great when one is young but I don’t like thinking about how they look on the aged. That’s my quirk. But I know some remarkable tattoo artists, creative, beautiful work. If you’re into it, that’s fine with me. But similar to my disinterest in poking further holes into myself, I’m going to remain on the sidelines.
agree 100%
but don’t get your hopes up. I was on a bus in San Francisco in the late 90’s and heard a pouty, baby-faced teenage girl whine about wanting to get a tattoo but her parents wouldn’t let her. I figured that when a trend trickled down to the teen set, it wouldn’t be desired by the 20-somethings anymore. “The end is soon for this silly trend!” I thought. It not only didn’t end, it got kicked into a higher gear…
Almost 50 years ago, while in the Navy, I wanted a tattoo something terrible. Never could find one that I just couldn’t live without. Today I’m so happy I never did.
All those people who started getting their first tattoos in late 90s and early 00s are now removing them. If I remember well, there was a noticeable trend around that time, among older teens and young adults, to tattoo anything and everything on one’s body.
Every generation has gone through this to some extent, with some of those who defiantly got their tattoos in in their early 20s went on to have corporate careers and regretted all that body art on display in the country club locker room… I guess these days this group is just a bit bigger, and/or the percentage of those with regrets is a bit higher.
I think that the rate of removal is going up also because the rate of application is going up.
If you do work in a corporate environment, you would know they are rather acceptable anymore (talking about well done art here – not the prison style tats). I imagine that varies with companies & culture. I have a feeling the more likely a company allows one to use a mac at work the more open they are to tattoos. It also falls in with the dress for success stuff – if you are meeting with a bunch of VPs that you don’t know – wear long sleeve shirt. A well done tattoo can make you more interesting – way worse is to dress like the typical engineer who wears clothing that more appropriate for yard work or hasn’t has a wardrobe update since the 80’s. In this current culture, well done art work can fit in with a professional image.
I guess it matters on the industry, but the higher paying “suit jobs” are not likely very tattoo friendly at all.
heard from a cook once who had his hands tattooed. he laid out his hands on a table and asked “Know what I call these? Minimum wage.”
turns out the visible hand tattoos cost him his position then and restricted his line chef job horizons. it’s probably changed since then, but I think there will always be a professional headwind against them
I worked with a guy 15 years or so ago who had a tattoo of a C:\ prompt on his shoulder. He also had the Windows logo (I think it was a WinNT-specific logo?) tattooed on his arm or something. He was obviously a big Microsoft fan.
I forget where they were, but I thought he was a complete moron for getting them. I wonder if he’s had them removed and replaced with an Apple logo yet? 😉
And for the record, I’d never get a tattoo of anything.
I find long sleeve clothing stops the interaction between eyes and screen as well.
I highly doubt if any Yakuza or Maori’s are getting their tattoos removed for any cultural reasons.
Give me a break…! How many tattoed wrist idiots does anyone think there are in total…?
Not enough to make this a news item, let alone a major concern of any sort.
If one’s dumb enough to scarvthemselves in the first instance, they probably don’t give a fsuck about society’s take anyway, so why should anyone but the tatooed be of any ome else’s concern.
Ti,e to tale responsibility for your thoughtless actions.
You don’t have to like them but your are the freaking idiot and a$$hole for insulting people like that because they choose to have tattoos. Its their lifestyle choice, to each their own! Unbelievable… and I don’t even have or want a tattoo.
The removal of tattoos may not make the blood vessels visible to the Watch. Scar tissue may be an issue.
If someone wants tat themselves, I have no problems with that. Everyone is different. Myself, I’m not attracted to any tattoos on the body.
As you could probably guess, I don’t have any love for tattoos or piercings or ‘body mods’. I will never disfigure my body unless it was an accident that tore my skin or broke my bones. It just seems uncivilized.
According to one of those fly-by-night internet “news channels” (that you can access via AppleTV), this is an AppleWatch problem. The announcer who said such a stupid thing seemed gleeful about it, as if, ha ha, the AppleWatch is DEFECTIVE.
I’d say that it’s not an AppleWatch problem; I’d say that it’s a problem for people who painted themselves up like pagans. Tattoos are dumb.
Oh, and this same lame internet “news channel” didn’t call them tattoos, but rather, “ink.” I guess “ink” is the new, cool euphemism for it.
I worked at Disneyland during college. They had a policy at the time to cover any and all tattoos on your body. Being a non-tat kind of guy, it seemed like a reasonable policy. Until I met an older gentleman who was working in his retirement. He always had a gauze patch on his forearm. I asked him about his ‘injury’ one day. He informed me that Disney required him to cover any ink… Including the concentration camp number the Germans had imprinted on his arm as a child. I never felt the same about that policy again…
Because what vacationing families REALLY want to see is a concentration camp tattoo number, right?
Your logic is unassailable, and your showy “sensitivity” is a wonder to behold.
Disney apologist, nazi apologist or both?
Disneyland stopped being for families decades ago. Now it’s simply a daycare center for SoCal sad sacks. Disneyworld may be different.
your attitude is disgraceful
Navy Vietnam vet here. I’ve seen me share of ta’oos. Different tastes I reckon, but to my taste, plain out ugly. Even on Pacific Islanders, and Yakuza. Lived in Japan over 30 years, onsens there will not allow people with ta’oos to enter the baths.
One old boy on my ship had ta’oos everywhere but his face and hands. I mean there was no place left open. When his wife stateside had a baby boy, I teased him wondering if the ta’oos came through to the baby. That baby is over 45 years old now… That’d make me a true codger, geezer, mouth breather I tell ye.
Tattoos are repulsive anyway, or to be kind, beyond my comprehension as to why, particularly beautiful young women, find them attractive. Me, I like nude, nekkid skin. Nothing sexy about ink blots.
LOL