Chameleon tattoos change color and may help diagnose disease

When a couple of tourists stumbled upon Otzi’s mummy in the Alps in 1991, they unknowingly found an example of the first tattoos in history. The 5,300-year-old body has 61 tattoos in the form of straight lines scrawled on the skin..

Chameleon tattoos change color and may help diagnose disease – facts

What surprised Carson Bruns, a chemist at CU Boulder more than the age of these drawings, was the material.

“They are no different from our tattoos,” Bruns explained. “My brain explodes with the realization that we are still using this same technology.”.

Bruns also has a few tattoos and is eager to make a difference. He and graduate student Jesse Butterfield are developing a series of “tech tattoos” that don’t just look cool on the skin – they also change color in response to various body signals. So far, tattoos that only appear in the sun and colored tattoos that disappear when they get hot are in the works..

These tattoos have artistic value, of course, but Bruns is going to make them useful as well. He wants to make these tattoos a conduit between a person and his body – they will warn people about the heat or help diagnose without expensive blood tests..

Bruns spoke about his ideas on Saturday, December 1st at TEDxMileHigh.

“When you think of tattoos, you feel like they’re just particles of ink under the skin,” Bruns says. “And our idea is, what if we can use nanotechnology to make these particles really useful?”

Custom colors

Trying to create tattoos like this brings together Bruns’ two passions. The man is also trying to learn how to control molecules and create miniature mechanisms..

But the Colorado native is a true artist at heart; he creates what he calls “custom color palettes.” He teaches a color course at ATLAS, talks about the history and culture of drawing in human society. He even drew a series of images of totem animals – there is both a bear and a giraffe, oddly enough, a buffalo – all in psychedelic colors..

“I like paint chemistry and color chemistry,” Bruns explained..

His technical tattoo project combines crazy colors with nanotechnology in miniature plastic balls. Bruns explained that the tattoo remains on the skin because it remains in the interstitial fluid that surrounds the cell, and thus does not destroy it..

To make smart inks equally stable, his team puts dyes in plastic microcapsules that are several times the width of a human hair. These capsules protect the dyes from wear and tear, but allow you to feel and respond to changes in the body. And these dyes can be applied to the skin with the same needles that regular tattoo artists use..

Sun freckles

Bruns thinks this approach is promising. He and Butterfield, for example, experimented with creating technical tattoos using commercially available dyes that are only visible when exposed to ultraviolet rays. The so-called “sun freckles” are useful for people who burn easily.

“If you put sunscreen over this tattoo, it would disappear even in the sun,” Bruns said. “When your sunscreen wears off, the pattern reappears, reminding you to apply it again.”.

In a similar vein, the team has developed tattoos that appear and disappear as temperatures change – a technology that Bruns says will become a kind of built-in thermometer..

He also added that this approach works for almost all paints. So Bruns is trying to think bigger. He is thinking about tattoos that will register blood alcohol levels – so that one can tell that someone is too drunk to drive – or the drawings can display blood sugar levels..

Bruns admits it will take at least a few years for this ink to hit salons. His creations must go through rigorous security checks before they can be used by humans. But there is one person who already uses a tech tattoo: Bruns.

The scientist gave himself sun freckles – two blue dots on the forearm. “I wanted to see if it worked,” he said..

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