58 ELLECANADA.COM
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IVEBEAUTY
RESTORATIVE TATTOOING Post-mastectomy nipple-areola reconstruction isn’t
new, but it used to happen in the surgeon’s office, not at the hands of an artist. “[Surgeons
were] trained to give a simple pink dot, not necessarily something that looks realistic,”
explains Shaughnessy Otsuji, co-founder of Studio Sashiko in Langley, B.C. Her trompe
l’oeil work is so convincingly 3-D, it’s hard to believe it’s just regular permanent body
ink done with a conventional tattoo machine. “I’m basically just tattooing a portrait of
a nipple, adding strategic shadows and highlights to make it kind of pop even though it’s
a flat area,” explains Otsuji, who was schooled in fine arts. Imperfection is key: “Adding
those little random wrinkles and bumps and details—that’s what makes it look real.” The
procedure is customized and geared to anyone wanting to re-pigment the areola, including
those with naturally pale nipples, breast-cancer survivors and transgender or non-binary
clients who’ve undergone top surgery. “I like to call it restorative tattooing rather than
cosmetic tattooing,” says Otsuji. “More and more, our clientele are people who’ve lost
some sort of feature, and we’re here to restore it and make it look as realistic as possible,
so our work is shifting to be more meaningful.”
HYBRID BROWS
The tattooed brows of the ’90s
were notorious for their blocky,
opaque shape and telltale shade
(often fading to blue), but pig-
ments and techniques have
gotten a major lift since then.
Now, microblading is the brow
service of choice, enabling the
artist to hand-etch thin, hair-
like strokes using a fine needle.
The finer the needle used,
the more feathery-looking
the results, says Mary Dang,
founder of Eye Love Beauty
Bar in Toronto, who calls her
method “micro-brow strok-
ing.” Her bespoke, keep-it-
real approach respects the
sometimes random direction
in which hairs sprout. “If you
have naturally neat eyebrows,
I would conform to that, but if
you have bushy, kind of wild
brows, I would follow that flow
pattern too,” she explains.
Since the pigments are
placed in the upper dermis,
microblading is semi-perma-
nent, lasting one to two years.
And like with all tattoos, the
crisp hair strokes blur over
time—expect to book annual
refreshers—and they can
get fuzzy even faster if you
have oily skin. But there’s
an increasingly popular
alternative that is suitable for
a wider range of skin types,
says Dang: the combo brow,
which pairs microblading with
the ombré-powder technique.
The latter uses a machine
tool to deposit pigments into
skin without making distinct
strokes, creating soft shading
that looks like you used powder
makeup (hence the name). “If
microblading doesn’t cover
enough holes or add density
where you need it, the powder
fills that in ever so lightly,”
she says.