Exclusive | Gen Z brides with regretful tattoos flock to laser treatment clinics to remove unsightly pre-wedding ink

Shania Addington was 18 when she got her first tattoo. A decade later, Gen Z’s bride-to-be wants out of the relationship.

The 28-year-old once had meaningful quotes written on her forearm and back – a decision she now seriously regrets, saying it made her “feel like a book”.

So much so, Arizona has already started the long process of moving out – with less than a year until her wedding.

“I want to be able to wear a dress that I feel comfortable in, where I don’t have to hide my tattoos,” Addington told The Post, calling the ink “embarrassing.”

“I wish I had thought of it 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 fan of heavily inked tattoos of her own – tried to brush her off, insisting that covering up with make-up for the big day would be enough.

But Addington will not budge. And she’s not the only bride to be blushing over her past choices.

Carmen VanderHeiden Brodie, co-founder and vice president of clinical operations at Removery, says it’s common for brides to request laser tattoo removal before their big day.

In fact, the tattoo removal company sees “too many weddings” as the main reason customers sign up for the service.

“Generally when someone comes in for their wedding, the turnaround time they’re looking for is very quick,” Brodie told The Post, explaining that while small tattoos have the potential to disappear within a year, it’s impossible to it is predicted how much ink. will respond to the 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 they can tone it down enough for the makeup to cover it on the day.”

While Addington’s upcoming wedding was the perfect excuse, the prospect of showing inked skin in a wedding dress has prompted a growing number of young women to express their regrets about tattoos online.

“I just realized how ugly these would look on a wedding dress,” TikToker 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’s getting them removed in “many of them”.

A make-up artist, who is only from Sam, also complained about the visible ink that adorns her arms and hands, saying she feels “a pang inside” when she sees blushing brides with “smooth, clean arms”. because when she gets married one day, she won’t “look like this”.

“This is just not what I envisioned for myself on my wedding day,” she said in a TikTok, referring to her tattoos.

“I always say, it’s when the book no longer matches the cover,” Brodie said of getting the tattoo removed. “And really, what we wear on our skin is the cover of our book and, obviously, who we are.”

But the influx of women expressing their ink regrets has caused an uproar, fueling debate among the body art community.

Mandy Lee, a Brooklyn-based content creator, 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 aren’t a “Pinterest trend” or akin to a “fashion micro-trend,” urging Gen Z to take its time when it comes to paint.

Lara Quinn, a 23-year-old content creator whose tattoos total more than 40 says anti-ink sentiment as it relates to the aesthetically pleasing bridal style “has always gotten under my skin.”

Tattoo regret, she explained, comes from a misunderstanding and misunderstanding of what a tattoo is — rather than being a “passing phase” to regret, like impulsively cutting bangs or wearing a certain style of clothing, it’s a “way of life”.

“People, I think, specifically in Gen Z, treat tattooing like it’s a trend and like it’s something that was a trend and it’s not a trend anymore instead of what it is, which is a lifestyle and a culture,” Quinn, who. is based in Boston, told The Post.

“It takes a certain amount of dedication that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily consider when they just start tattooing randomly without any forethought, without any prior knowledge.”