ABSTRACT
Many pigments that were used for temporary, yet routine, repeated purposes such as ritual body painting, medical treatments, and cosmetics have evolved into being applied in a more permanent fashion, namely tattooing. It is likely that many practices started as temporary, such as the use of cosmetics or body painting for cultural, ritual, magical, and religious purposes. Whether by necessity or accident, at some point it was determined that by inserting the pigments into the skin, the symbols, designs, and overall staining treatments would last for a longer period of time, if not permanently. Of course, it is likely that this transition was based on experimentation and trial-and-error, as was observed with the reports of tattoo artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
