Tattoo ink sold on Amazon has high levels of weird and rare bacteria
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I also imagine its a complex and fun problem to try and solve. Ive noticed they have started in some ways, for example some brands are now labeled as "premium brand sourced" which means less likely to be fake.
Previously (B2C): incentivized to deliver great customer experience to make money on increased sales volume and higher-price purchases
Now (B2B): incentivized to deliver easy seller experience to make money on increasing number of sellers and sales volume
To be fair, Amazon still cares a surprisingly amount about its end customers, when it doesn't need to, as a legacy of its rabidly awesome B2C days...
... but over time the company will continue to errode and optimize itself to its current customers (sellers).
Why doesn't Amazon do more to strategically combat fakes / bad products? Because sellers literally don't care about that. It's not a priority for them, so it's not a priority for Amazon.
Amazon is now for the “we technically have QA but honestly don’t give a shit” sellers. Not quite alibaba but getting there.
The core distinction between Ebay and Amazon is that on Ebay each shop+product combination is its own listing and the seller reputation is put up front, with the buy button below the seller information. Meanwhile on Amazon there are product listings, with multiple sellers providing the same product and the seller name being put below the buy button. There is no obvious indication that you are buying from a third party seller on Amazon, whereas on Ebay you can only buy from third parties, so expectations adjust accordingly.
Makes for using independent store fronts a breeze because almost every checkout experience through shopify shares a common login and CC info.
Prime (no pun intended) example of enshittification [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
It's far from unique to amazon, though. The Microsoft employee/contractor decision in the 90s made it socially acceptable to treat contractors like shit, and it's been downhill since then.
EDIT: This is not a secret, but by all means, keep downvoting me.
[1] Only Amazon Resale third party resellers are shown https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Anodized-Non-stick-Stac...
If you are in the USA report unsafe products here: https://www.saferproducts.gov/
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/18/health/tattoo-ink-permane...
But the real point here is to respond to the OP's idea that tattoo ink should be regulated as a medical product. It's not a medical product, just like cigarettes aren't, piercings, aren't, etc. Medical products are things that are supposed to improve your health and affect your body, so of course there's no call to regulate cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, methamphetamine, or tattoo ink as medical products, because they simply aren't (they don't improve your health, nor claim to usually), even though they obviously can affect your health.
Tattooing has a history stretching back thousands of years, don't let a random unsourced comment on an internet forum dissuade you from pursuing something you want.
My dad is as cheap as they get, even he doesn’t buy that stuff from Amazon.
I do tend to buy from brand stores and not aggregators or unknown sellers (I’ve been an aggregator for sneakers, but I drop-shipped via the brands directly; I’m more than familiar with SellerCentral).
And my argument isn’t that no one has these issues, but I’m pushing back on the “who even buys on Amazon anymore?” retort.
One thing I've noticed is that you don't really know where its coming from on Amazon. It will say its fulfilled by Amazon themselves, or the manufacturer, but when the package comes it is often actually from some shady 3rd party that was never mentioned. A few times I've had broken, damaged, or dirty items that were obvious returns resold as new. Sometimes in janky homemade style packaging like an eBay item.
I do, and my experience is nearly like yours - in opposite to what many people claim about the US Amazon (amazon.com).
When I visit my elderly mom after several months, I can't quite understand how she's purchased all sorts of bunk from everywhere, not just Amazon. From church MLM sales, to random youtube ads that take her to a store front. While the things she has purchased isn't an absolute scam, they tend to either be low quality or far overpriced for the purchased price.
I do think that there is both a tech privilege that our cohort shares in both high compensation and a better tuned intuition as we tend to be the creators of many products and have a good smell test when it comes to how the sauce is made. The high comp allows for us to purchase the high quality, brand-name version of many products. While understanding the sauce behind a lot of stuff informs my internal heuristics of price, pictures, marketing, 1,3, and 4 star reviews.
I do get the impression that those that are scammed on Amazon tend to be the cohort that is looking for esoteric goods, bleeding edge folks, or just the generally non-privileged folks that will gamble on a $7 Amazon item rather than a $100 version of the thing.
e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Bloodline-Tattoo-Selling-Colors-Stabl...
Then you choose which to buy.
And then Amazon sends your artist the comingled counterfeit ink from Storage Tote #29924
As a platform, they can probably get around counterfeit items being listed/sold, but sending one from a different seller seems it might open them up to legal risk if Amazon knows there's counterfeits floating around.
I'm sure we all accept the risk in the fine print somewhere, but that only matters until it makes the news and a politician thinks they can get reelected by going after them
Moreover, having a tattoo isn’t necessarily a measure of low impulse control. I have friends who have ruminated for years about a certain tattoo. Plus, imputing bad decision making to having a tattoo is more a (cultural) projection on your part than anything else.
> If you want to broadcast your low impulse control and bad decision making history, be my guest.
> I do think less of someone with tattoos
And then:
> would never ever say anything to anyone to make them feel bad about it.
Which one is it?
My tattoos have worked great so far, even online!
If you're quick to judge someone's character based on their tattoos, it suggests a tendency toward superficial assessments. I find it difficult to trust critical decisions made by someone who relies on such surface-level judgments. In my experience, those with narrow, dogmatic worldviews are often less interested in finding real solutions and more preoccupied with adhering to authority and bureaucratic norms.
A transparent tattoo has parts inside of it where the skin is still completely visible or the skin is partially visible.
A solid tattoo blocks out your natural skin color entirely and is generally associated with criminal gangs such as the Japanese Yakuza or tattoo addictions.
Is the organizational pressure that seeks conformity filtering out tattoos based on tattoos or the lack of conformity? It's tough to understand whether you're saying more about self-perpetuating hierarchies or tattoos.
I'm aligned with your base point. I'm not seeking to extend my rational to anyone other than people who make their opinions well known.
Disgust is one of the most easily telegraphed human reactions. Also, haters with suboptimal impulse control can't avoid using any and every soapbox at their disposal to make sure you know where they stand on the matter.
Exempli gratia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41374358
In fact, many tattoos take months of consideration and require setting aside a non-trivial amount of money.
Not that you’d know that, since you make judgements based on the color of people’s skin.
She has vitiligo so has little control over how she looks. Tattoos make her confident and give her back control.
You should judge people less.
I’ve offered a perspective that you may not have seen before.
The existence of hypocrisy doesn’t excuse you from fault for trying to offend every person with a tattoo.
Me thinking someone has low impulse control isn't an offense. Me telling them they have low impulse control is an offense (i never said this to anyone). Me being honest about the thought that came into my mind in a discussion board is also not an offense. And I cannot control the thoughts that come to my mind, only my actions after. If anything I learned to keep my mouth shut from this thread, it's the first and last time I discuss tattoos.
people have four levels of being, there's conscious you, lizard brain, addict brain, and ideal brain. lizard brain gets the most time. it's the baser sider of things that we can't help, like who we're attracted to (masc/femme/nb) or what we think of people with tattoos. Then there's conscious brain. that's the part of us that's rational and can recognize that lizard brain does and thinks dumb things. addict brain is where there's something you're addicted to. chemical/digital/physical; whatever. addict brain will rationalize that something that conscious brain knows is wrong into being okay. Oh it's just $10 dollars and it's only Candy crush. idea brain is who you are after an interaction has happened, when you win the argument in the shower or wake up knowing the solution to a problem. sometimes idea brain will happen in the moment, but most of the time it happens later.
anyway, we can't help lizard brain, especially when we're sleep deprived, high/drunk/groggy/strongly emotional, and it can say some horrible shit. some people are able to acknowledge that this happens to everyone and exists and is human and forgive other people when they do something, others pretend like that they're not like that and that it never happens to them.
This is the divide between introvert and extrovert, btw. introverts can't "mask off" around other people, so being around other people is exhausting for them. if they say they don't belive something but that this thought still happens, eg that people with tattoos are impulsive, they get excoriated for voicing having had the thought.
sadly, as you've found, the open Internet just isn't the place for that. thankfully, there are small private communities where people do understand such detail and nuance, but they're hard to find.
cards on the table though, my current tattoo wasn't the result of much planning, but having gotten one, I more respect the time and effort that goes into getting really good ones.
on my wish list is the https://imprintu.com/ temporary tattoo printer, which seems fun.
Except I didn’t get offended.
Note that the parent hasn’t responded to the alternative perspective I offered; so I don’t really buy the “I’m here for discussion” spiel.
I can't find a way to read OP's comment that isn't derisive. I don't see we get "I just want a discussion" out of it.
Heck, reputable artists boom out for months.
I have several other tattoos that I have been thinking about for years. I have mapped out at least a general guide of where the tattoos I plan on getting, likely over at least the next 10 years on my body.
Tattoos are expensive. Most are not going to impulse something that expensive.
Thankfully most people have some common sense and realize that tattoos are just another way of expressing who you are and not trying to force uniformity. There are still some weird views about "acceptable" tattoo locations but thats another story.
I won't even hide my tattoo's for an interview, if you have a problem with it thats your problem and I don't care to work with you.
I don't know. I mean I am still eventually going to get the tattoos, the meaning of all of the tattoos I want are important to me. So technically no the plan hasn't changed and I am actively talking to an artist about my next tattoo. But what exactly to do about this situation... I honestly don't know yet.
I don't even know how I would vet the ink. Just asking if they got it from Amazon sure, but I have to imagine that this is not limited to Amazon and we only learned about it due to scale.
As for most things, there are probably infinite reasons why someone gets tattoos. It seems highly presumptuous, almost egotistical, to presume you somehow know the reasons. You yourself don't know the reasons for why you do things, because choice is complex. You make millions of subconscious choices daily and those choices feed other choices. And then a lot of it was simply fed to you, implemented into your brain and you never bothered to circle back and question it.
I mean, just ask someone why they believe what they believe. Not what their belief is, but WHY they believe it. Most of the time they don't know. They can't tell you. And it's THEIR beliefs that they, supposedly, formed. They own them. But you think you can understand other, random people's, motivation?
I think there's this widespread, I guess, "deficiency" where people can't say "I don't know". It's like the LLMs. They can't look at something, say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" and move on. And you can see this in so, so many things.
Someone the other day asked why gay voice exists and why that's a thing. Truly, I don't know and I don't know that anyone does, even gay men. But of course this other guy chimes in about how they fake it and it's for attention. How could he possibly know that? How did he even come to that conclusion? Why do people do this?
Personally, I have never seen a case where tattoos improved someone's health, or appearance for that matter.
This is subjective. "Health" here might be taken to include mental health, in which case there could be many positive benefits.
That said, there are some objectively bad health outcomes that can come from getting tattoos [1, 2]. Not that they necessarily will.
[1] infections, autoimmune response, etc: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jocd.14498
[2] lymphoma: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/tattoos-may-increa...
100% this. I have a tattoo on my forearm that just makes me happy to look at. It is nearly always partially in my vision while working due to its location. If I am having a bad day I can just look at it and smile. It reflects an important part of me.
The mental health benefit of that, has been incredibly noticeable in my day to day.
Could I have done something similar with a picture on my phone or something? Sure. But this clearly has a huge impact on my mental health so why not get it tattooed. Also my 5th tattoo so it wasn't a crazy idea for me.
Aesthetically it's a matter of taste, but I've certainly seen tattoos where I thought they improved the person's appearance. Though Sturgeon's law does apply.
My dad had small fiducials tattooed onto his body to index where radiation was being delivered, which resulted in the cure of his prostate cancer.
Medical tattoos are also used in reconstructive surgery.
The issue is with poor health and safety controls.
I would assume that if this was a problem you would know pretty soon after getting a tattoo right? Like if my tattoos are fully healed and at least a few months old I should be in the clear? I don't see this mentioned in the article.
Really don't like the idea of now needing to ask my artist about the source of their ink, but I also assume that Amazon likely isn't the only source of some bad ink.