There’s nothing we love more than makeup and all things cosmetics, but beauty goes far deeper than just the foundation on your face or polish on your nails. With the power of medical tattooing, makeup is being used to transform the lives of many people by helping them feel beautiful and confident in their skin again, thanks to the generosity and innovation of one tattoo artist.
Although permanent makeup is not an entirely new concept, medical tattooing by one specific woman is aiding countless people who struggle with serious, life-long scars. Toronto-based tattoo artist Basma Hameed was inspired by her own personal journey of being severely burned as a child to help other women recover, in a sense, from discoloration and scars.
With reconstructive surgery being expensive, painful and not always successful, Hameed decided to have permanent eyebrows tattooed on her face. Happy with the results, she wondered if the same procedure could be mimicked, but to balance skin tone pigments on scar tissue and discolored skin.
Hameed tattooed her own pigmentation back onto her face with the procedure of paramedical micropigmentation and realized this cosmetic insight could help the lives of so many others.
One patient of Hameed’s is Samira Omar, a 17-year-old student who was harshly burned with boiling water when bullied by fellow classmates abroad. Parts of her face, neck and hands were left pigmented and discolored, which left her unrecognizable after the incident. After hearing of Omar's story, Hameed felt the need to reach out and help her as much as she could and offered to restore the confidence that Omar felt like she had lost.
Omar is now able to have her natural skin tone returned to her face and body with several visits over the course of a few months to Hameed—at no cost. Since it takes a period of a couple visits to fully heal, Omar is masking the scars with a scar concealer Hameed developed for her patients that hides and blends cleverly with natural skin tone.
Hameed uses a hand-held device to make small repeated punctures into the skin during the procedure. This spreads the permanent pigment under the skin to give the patient a natural look that some may have thought would never come back.
Hameed’s technique is growing in popularity and she hopes to have procedures like this be available all over the world one day so people who struggle with burn scars, skin pigmentation and even those patients who have had a mastectomy will be able to feel comfortable and satisfied in their own skin once again.
Makeup, for most of us, is a way to express and present ourselves—we like to think of it as a way to enhance our natural beauty. There's nothing more important than feeling comfortable and great in the skin you're in, and if makeup can be used in that same way to help restore confidence in burn victims and others, we couldn't be more supportive.
Beauty goes farther than just skin deep cover-up—it can be used to transform people’s lives.