Most Overlooked Sanitation Mistakes in Tattooing

Sanitation is all about controlling risk. It’s not black or white and if you skip one thing then none of it matters. It’s impossible to has a truly sterile environment unless you are doing a full surgery theater with the scrub down and uniforms and lights. The idea is to use as many preventative practices as possible and to reduce risk with universal precautions (pretending every person has a blood borne illness).

Nobody wants to be unsanitary and everyone does their best. We don’t judge or criticize and believe harm reduction and resource sharing is the best way to improve conditions for clients and artists. So, here are 4 commonly missed sanitation practices we see in the tattoo industry:

1. GLOVE REMOVAL. Washing your hands after removing your gloves. Have you ever noticed your hands are wet or sweaty when you take your gloves off? It’s basically a bacteria farm inside of your gloves and its important to wash your hands with soap & warm water for 30 seconds when removing gloves.

2. NO SANITATION WITHOUT AGITATION. You have to wipe things to actually disinfect and sanitize. You can’t just spray something. It has to actually be agitated to remove bacteria.

3. KILL TIME. Most disinfecting sprays have a 10min kill time. So you have to spray and then wait 10min before wiping in order to allow th product to work. The only product that kills micro bacteria instantly is bleach. Check the label- some products is 3min and some are 10min.

4. CROSS CONTAMINATION. Touching something like the studio scissors or your phone screen with your gloves on after touching your tattoo machine or client’s skin. This one is tough because you’re dealing with an invisible enemy and you have to literally mentally keep track of what you have touched. The biggest one we see is when artists use a shared area like a studio will have a stencil printer station or a station with scissors and second skin- artist will forget they were tattooing with their gloves on and then touch the shared scissors to quickly cut a last piece of Saniderm. Then the next person uses them and has no way of knowing they were previously handled with contaminated gloves by another artist in the studio.

Hope this helps! Share this with an artist or friend! If our resources help you, then make sure to follow our Amazon Influencer page and check out more free DIY tattoo resources on our Amazon Influencer storefront:

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