Gen Z brides with tattoo regret flock to laser treatment clinics to remove unsightly ink before weddings
Shania Addington was 18 when she got her first tattoo. A decade later, the Gen Z bride-to-be wants out of the relationship.
The 28-year-old had formerly meaningful quotes inked on both her forearm and back — a decision she now seriously regrets, saying they made her “feel like a book.”
So much so, the Arizonan has already initiated the lengthy removal process — with less than a year until her wedding.
“I want to be able to wear a dress that I’m comfortable in where I’m not having to hide my tattoos,” Addington told The Post, calling the ink “embarrassing.”
“I wish I’d thought about it back then,” she confessed, saying that the idea of taking photos for her upcoming wedding helped her make her decision.
It’s one that her mother — a tattoo fan with plenty of ink of her own — attempted to talk her out of, insisting that covering up with makeup for the big day would suffice.
But Addington wouldn’t be swayed. And she’s not the only bride blushing over her past choices.
Carmen VanderHeiden Brodie, the co-founder and vice president of clinical operations at Removery, says it’s common for brides to seek out laser tattoo removal ahead of their big day.
In fact, the tattoo removal company sees “lots of weddings” as the primary reason clients sign up for the service.
“Generally when somebody comes in for their wedding, the turnaround time that they’re looking for is super fast,” Brodie told The Post, explaining that, while small tattoos have the potential to disappear within a year, it’s impossible to predict how ink will respond to laser.
“A lot of times a wedding is planned less than a year, so usually what we’ll try to do is work with them so that they can fade it down enough so that makeup will cover it on that day.”
While Addington’s upcoming nuptials were the perfect excuse, the prospect of showing inked skin in a bridal gown has prompted a growing number of young women to express their own tattoo regrets online.
“Just realized how fkn ugly these will look in a wedding dress,” TikTokker Jess Riordan wrote in a viral clip.
“When you realize how ugly the tattoos you got when you were younger will look in a wedding dress,” wrote fellow creator Taylor Madison, who noted in the caption of her video that she is removing them on “a lot of them.”
A makeup artist, who goes only by Sam, also lamented the visible ink decorating her arms and hands, saying that she feels “an inner ache” when she sees blushing brides with “smooth, clean arms” because when she gets married someday, she isn’t “going to look like that.”
“That’s just not what I envisioned for myself on my wedding day,” she said in a TikTok, referencing her tattoos.
“I always say, it’s when the contents of the book doesn’t match the cover anymore,” Brodie said of tattoo removal. ” And really, what we’re wearing on our skin is the cover of our book and, obviously, who we are.”
But the influx of women vocalizing their ink regrets has caused a stir, drumming up debate among the body art community.
Mandy Lee, a content creator based in Brooklyn, called it the “dumbest s–t” she’s ever heard, arguing that the “clean girl” aesthetic desired by brides-to-be can still be achieved with body art.
Making her case in a viral TikTok clip, Lee said tattoos are not a “Pinterest trend” or akin to a “fashion micro-trend,” urging Gen Z to take their time when getting inked.
Lara Quinn, a 23-year-old content creator whose tattoos total well over 40, says the anti-ink sentiments as they relate to aesthetically pleasing bridal style have “always just gotten under my skin.”
Tattoo regret, she explained, comes from a misconception and misunderstanding of what tattooing is — rather than a “passing phase” to be regretted, like impulsively cutting bangs or wearing a certain style of clothes, it’s a “lifestyle.”
“People, I think, in Gen Z specifically, treat tattooing as if it’s a trend and as if it was something that was trending and is no longer trending instead of what it is, which is a lifestyle and a culture,” Quinn, who is based in Boston, told The Post.
“It requires a certain amount of like dedication that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily take into account when they just start getting tattoos randomly without any forethought, without any background knowledge.”
