BRENNAL PIERRE AND VANDAN SHAH

COFOUNDER AND CTO; COFOUNDER, EPHEMERAL

TTattoos are a lifetime commitment. Or they used to be. New York–based startup Ephemeral opened a shop last March offering tattoos that promise to fade away after one year. The tattoo itself is applied by traditional, mechanical needles. What’s different is the ink. Typical tattoo inks clump up in the skin’s dermis, where the pigments resist antibody proteins that try to break them down. Ephemeral cofounders Brennal Pierre and Vandan Shah developed an ink that’s laced with the same Fdaapproved plastics used in pills and medical implants, so it still clumps in the skin but biodegrades as the immune system breaks it down. Once the ink has been broken down, it can pass through the skin, gradually lifting over a period of 9 to 15 months. Pierre and Shah, who got their Phds in the same chemical engineering lab at New York University, were inspired to create Ephemeral after their friend (and cofounder) David

Seung Shin, now chief of staff at Getlabs, went through the painful and expensive process of having a tattoo laserremoved. The duo began studying how tattoos functioned, and how the ink might be engineered to self-destruct. After developing their first formula, in 2016, the team tested it on pig skin with great success. But when Shah enthusiastically turned the tattoo gun on himself, the results weren’t as good. “It didn’t transfer into my skin at all,” Shah says with a laugh. After five years of development and safety testing—“we’re still the guinea pigs,” Shah jokes—the team found a formula that works (and applied for two patents) and opened a shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s currently booked eight months out, and business is growing 100% month over month. The company will open a second studio, in Los Angeles, this fall.