Arsenic, lead and cobalt.
These are some of the health-hazardous substances that the Medical Products Agency has found in its random samples of tattoo inks.
Similar findings were made both last year and the year before last.
“This year’s supervision project does not show any improvement,” writes the Swedish Medicines Agency in a press release.
40 percent of the 46 tattoo inks examined contained an illegal amount of heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and cobalt.
“It is serious that we do not see any improvement. The results of the review clearly show that the companies’ attitude and understanding of the rules needs to be improved,” says the Swedish Medical Products Agency’s investigator Elmira Tavoosi in the press release.
In addition to heavy metals, 15 percent of the paints contained polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a group of cancer-causing substances also found in untreated industrial exhaust, tar and tobacco smoke.