Craft MD

Some of this ink is in my lymph nodes. That part is true.

A viral post told me the rest: tattooed people have a 21% higher risk of lymphoma, and the immune system never stops fighting the ink. I have three tattoos and I'd like that to be wrong, so I read the studies instead of the slides.

The 21% is real and it comes from a good Swedish study of 11,905 people. Its confidence interval runs from 0.99 to 1.48, which means the study could not rule out zero effect, and bigger tattoos weren't worse. Two meta-analyses since, 17,941 and 140,841 people, both landed on 1.0: no difference. One small Danish twin study found tattoos bigger than a palm tied to 2.7 times the lymphoma hazard, from 316 twins, with an interval wide enough to drive through. That is what "we don't know yet" looks like in numbers.

If the 21% were real and the ink caused it, a man's lifetime risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma goes from about 1 in 46 to 1 in 38. Worst case. Not nothing. Not the feeling the headline sold, either.

The "immune system never stops" slide was a mouse study, footpads, published last November. Real finding, wrong species, and a published reply in the same journal called the model too far from clinical reality.

What is settled: the pigment migrates to your lymph nodes and stays, ink hides moles, and laser removal shatters pigment into smaller pieces that travel more easily. So mine stays. Get the skin under your ink checked like any other skin, and if a lymph node near a tattoo ever swells, tell the doctor you're tattooed before the biopsy. Ink has been mistaken for cancer on the slide.

Not debunked. Not proven. Show me your oldest tattoo.

Your filler never left.

Thirty-three people, scanned by MRI at least two years after their last syringe of hyaluronic acid. Filler in every one of them. Some of it 8 to 15 years old. A beauty journalist scanned her own face after nearly four years off: about 35 mL still in there. The product that "lasts a year" doesn't leave. It accumulates. That's the pillow face, and it's why I went looking for a volumizer that becomes tissue instead of staying a gel.

What I found comes from a cadaver. Donor fat, screened and processed, sold as Renuva, Lipoderma and alloClae, with Tiger's dermaClae due early 2027. I stock three of them and I charge for every vial, so weigh what follows accordingly. No stock, no money from the makers.

The case against, since nobody selling it will make it: the entire published human literature is 93 patients. The one facial study that measured retention with 3D imaging found a third of the volume still there at six months, plus or minus 30, in eleven women, written by the company's consultants. None of these products is FDA approved or cleared; they're regulated as human tissue, the lane cadaver bone travels in, and no trial is required before sale. And there is no eraser. Hyaluronic acid has an enzyme that dissolves it in minutes. Fat has nothing, which is why fat is the worst material to get into a facial artery.

The case for: under a microscope, at six months, it isn't the product anymore. It's the patient's own fat cells, grown into a scaffold that then dissolves. Ten patients. And the person I use it for has nothing else: she lost the weight on a GLP-1 and her face went with it, and there is no fat on her to move.

So: small volumes, slowly, under ultrasound, in amounts I'd be comfortable keeping forever, expecting a third to stay. Filler is dead, long live cadaver fat is the sentence I wanted to write. This is the one the data allowed.

What year is your oldest filler from?

There is a Star Destroyer on my living room floor and a study that says to leave it there.

I wanted that to be true, so I read it. Thirty-seven four-year-olds at one preschool in 1982. Researchers scored how complex their block building was, then came back for their math grades. Third grade: nothing. Fifth: nothing. Seventh: depends which table you read. High school: the kids who built more complex things at four had better math grades and took more honors math. By then the sample was 27 children, and the authors themselves wrote that no causal relationship was established.

If a device rep handed me that to sell me a laser, you'd hear about it here. Same standard for Lego.

So why is the Star Destroyer still on my floor? Because the better evidence points the same way. A 2022 meta-analysis of 29 studies and 3,765 people found that training spatial reasoning improves math, and that doing it with real objects in your hands beats doing it on a screen. Small effect. Real effect. And I spend my working day rotating shapes in my head and finding out whether they fit, so I'm inclined to believe it.

Disclosure: I'm a father who does not want to clean the living room. Weigh accordingly.

What's on your floor right now? Post it. And send this to whoever just stepped on one.