Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Are there any permanent physiological side effects from tattoos?
Dear Matthew Alice:
I'm reading a mystery novel written in Japan in the 1940s that has a lot of information about tattoos in it. I wanted to check out one quote that seems pretty amazing. "When a person gets a major tattoo, there are also some permanent physiological side effects, including a perceptible change in metabolism....Having tattoos over a large area of the body radically lowers body temperature. Even on the most torrid summer day, tattooed skin is cool to the touch." Is this true?
-- Toni, North Park
I guess anybody'd be chilly, constantly stripping to show off a massive tat. That's one theory we scrounged up to explain your story. Current medical research suggests a tattoo itself has no permanent effect on your body's insides. The ink sits in the middle skin layer, the dermis, between the cells, and everything else continues to hum along just fine. When local medical experts were backed up against a wall and threatened in order to make them come up with a guess, a theory, anything, no matter how unlikely, to explain cold tattooed people, they whimpered something about how the occasional person will lose body hair permanently in the tattooed area. Without this heat-holding barrier, might the tattooed lady feel like a well-chilled carp? Perhaps it's a reaction to heavy metals used in 1940s-era tattoo inks. Might an overdose of chromium, mercury, cobalt, and manganese cause frost to form? Though far from satisfied, we took pity and let the doctors go. On the subject of weird tattoo lore, the only fact-like object we could dig up is a story of one heavily decorated patient who underwent magnetic resonance imaging in a hospital lab. The MRI somehow caused much burning, swelling, and discomfort when it interacted with iron oxide in the tattoo dye.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Are there any permanent physiological side effects from tattoos?
Are there any permanent physiological side effects from tattoos?
Dear Matthew Alice:
I'm reading a mystery novel written in Japan in the 1940s that has a lot of information about tattoos in it. I wanted to check out one quote that seems pretty amazing. "When a person gets a major tattoo, there are also some permanent physiological side effects, including a perceptible change in metabolism....Having tattoos over a large area of the body radically lowers body temperature. Even on the most torrid summer day, tattooed skin is cool to the touch." Is this true?
-- Toni, North Park
I guess anybody'd be chilly, constantly stripping to show off a massive tat. That's one theory we scrounged up to explain your story. Current medical research suggests a tattoo itself has no permanent effect on your body's insides. The ink sits in the middle skin layer, the dermis, between the cells, and everything else continues to hum along just fine. When local medical experts were backed up against a wall and threatened in order to make them come up with a guess, a theory, anything, no matter how unlikely, to explain cold tattooed people, they whimpered something about how the occasional person will lose body hair permanently in the tattooed area. Without this heat-holding barrier, might the tattooed lady feel like a well-chilled carp? Perhaps it's a reaction to heavy metals used in 1940s-era tattoo inks. Might an overdose of chromium, mercury, cobalt, and manganese cause frost to form? Though far from satisfied, we took pity and let the doctors go. On the subject of weird tattoo lore, the only fact-like object we could dig up is a story of one heavily decorated patient who underwent magnetic resonance imaging in a hospital lab. The MRI somehow caused much burning, swelling, and discomfort when it interacted with iron oxide in the tattoo dye.
Comments