How it works
Q-switching holds laser energy back, then dumps it in a burst lasting a few nanoseconds. Squeeze a fixed pulse energy into a window that short and peak power multiplies by tens of thousands, a point our engineering archive illustrates with worked numbers. The pulse gets absorbed by pigment particles faster than heat can leak into surrounding tissue, so the particle shatters photoacoustically rather than cooking its neighborhood. That's selective photothermolysis, the mechanism Anderson and Parrish described in 1983, and it's still why nanosecond lasers are the workhorse for ink and melanin.
What happens next is biology, not bleaching. Our device manuals put it plainly: some fragments are ejected at the skin surface, and the rest get engulfed by phagocytes and cleared through the lymphatic system over the following weeks.
Wavelength steers the target. At 1064 nm the light penetrates deeper and is taken up less by epidermal melanin, which helps with dermal pigment and with darker skin. At 532 nm absorption by red chromophores is much stronger, so it suits red ink and superficial spots. The adjustable spot diameter matters too; a small spot concentrates fluence on stubborn ink, a wider one covers area at gentler settings.
