Temporary tattoos are usually pretty painless. They only take a minute, and you don’t have to worry about the big needles used for regular tattoos. However your typical henna tattoo wasn’t good enough for Matt Camper, an urban entomologist at Colorado State University.
Camper decided to create a completely new kind of temporary tattoo, one powered by 1,000 hungry bedbugs.
This is Matt Camper. He’s an urban entomologist at Colorado State University.
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This is his “bedbug tattoo gun.” Essentially it’s a glass jar filled with 1,000 hungry bedbugs. The jar has a porous top in the shape of a bunny rabbit. To get it working, all you need to do is press the top of the jar to your arm. Then the bedbugs will sense your body heat, and come for a snack.
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Bedbugs feed on human and animal blood. If you don’t think about them sucking your blood, they’re pretty impressive creatures. They track hosts, by sensing their body heat, and carbon dioxide emissions. While they’re feeding bedbugs also inject a numbing chemical into the skin. This way it’s more a tickling sensation, than a biting one. Which is also why you don’t wake up when they feed on you in your sleep.
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This is how Camper’s arm looked about two hours after the bites.
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Here is what it looked like about 24 hours afterwards. You can see redness and swelling because of the body’s immune response to the bites.
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Within 48 hours, you can start to see the bunny rabbit pattern taking shape on Camper’s skin again. Still looks pretty painful, and itchy.
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After 3 days the swelling and redness from the bites have gone down. You can now clearly see the little bunny rabbit.
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The marks from the “bedbug tattoo gun,” are only temporary. Here is Camper showing off the spot where his tattoo used to be about two weeks after administering it.
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Check out the full video of Camper getting his bedbug tattoo.
(via: Huffington Post)
This gives me the willies. What’s wrong with getting a regular temporary tattoo? Not to mention, it probably itches way worse than regular tattoo does.
