Artificial Color
10 May 2011
Maybe I can post more than once a week. Just not every day anymore.
So it turns out that black tattoo ink is generally made with bone char. This is the same stuff they use to make sugar really, really white. Seems strange that something black can make things white, but I guess none of the black gets in there. It just absorbs particles like a magnet.
When I was a kid, I liked to play with food coloring. I remember turning an entire jug of milk pink or blue. And I tried a few times to mix the four colors from the box in such a way as to get black. I never succeeded, although my Aunt Linda did. She made a cake that was a car with black wheels, I think. Rest in peace, Aunt Linda.
Then one day, it occurred to me that all those colors come from somewhere. Sure, I can just open the bottle for red or green, but that stuff comes from different sources. Flowers, blood, the dried, crushed bodies of pregnant female scale insects. Yep, that's where the dye is derived for the Italian liquor, Campari, according to Chemical & Engineering News. And, according to Snopes, they use that same stuff in fruit juices, gelatins, candies, and shampoos.
When I mentioned blood, I was thinking more of paint. I'm not sure that blood is used in any food colorings, although I don't see why it wouldn't be. People do eat blood all the time. The color red makes people hungry. And when people buy raw meat, they want it to be red, right? Meat that has turned brown, even if it's still good to eat, doesn't look very appealing. So, guess what. No, they don't use dye to color it red; they use carbon monoxide. Yep, the stuff that comes out of your car's exhaust pipe. Carbon monoxide has a way of making sure the red meat stays red for a long, long time.
And salmon? You know how those fish are super pink, right? Well, not farm raised salmon. Wild salmon are pink because they eat krill in the ocean, but farm raised salmon eat...something else, and it makes their flesh gray, not unlike most fish. So to make it pink, SalmoFan is added to their food pellets. SalmoFan is a chemical produced by Hoffman-La Roche, a huge pharmaceutical company. I guess feeding the fish something that will turn their flesh pink doesn't sound as bad as injecting the flesh with colorant after the fact.
Back to tattoos, the topic that got me on this in the first place. While there is vegan tattoo ink out there, the most common stuff isn't vegan. So, unless you search for it, you can assume it's not vegan. This is something a vegan should really check into before getting a tattoo that says "vegan." Like this lady who got the word tattooed on the inside of her lip.
One of the comments at the bottom mentions that tattoos in the mouth eventually fade, so she won't have to live with it her whole life. This doesn't sound reassuring, because if it's fading then it's slowly breaking down. And if it's breaking down, where else can it be going but down her throat. So every single day for the rest of her life she'll be ingesting a little bit of bone char.
