The Creation of I Love Ink: by Tina Davies & Perma Blend

Like so many PMU artists, there was a time when Tina DaviesOpens a new window was frustrated with the products available to her. “I had been tattooing for 20 years,” she recalls, “and even after all of that experience, I still struggled with eyebrow colors so much. I couldn’t get decent retention, the colors faded, or they came out really weird. Every line I tried failed me. I was desperate for solutions.”

Perma Blend’s Brand Director, a PMU artist herself, Anne-Marie Rubino had faced similar struggles in the early days of her career. “In all of the education I received from top artists, the emphasis was always on how to correct color that had changed or shifted,” Anne-Marie shares. Like most artists, she took for granted that this was the way it was for permanent makeup. “It took my brother, who always thinks outside the box, to really see a new way and change how things were done in the industry.”

Anne-Marie’s brother is, of course, Lou Rubino, founder and owner of World Famous Tattoo Ink, the brand that revolutionized the tattoo industryOpens a new window with its high-quality inks preferred by tattoo artists worldwide. “As a manufacturer of pigments deposited into the skin,” Anne-Marie explains, “Lou knew that colors should not be shifting the way PMU artists were taught to expect. So together, we changed that.”

It was through the tattoo industry that Tina Davies first encountered Perma Blend, Lou, and Anne-Marie. Though she’d been taught not to use body inks in PMU procedures, she was open to the recommendation of a friend, even if it went against everything she knew as a PMU artist. “My friend told me I had to try Perma Blend when she came across them and World Famous Tattoo Ink at a tattoo show. I trusted her. I knew that what I’d been taught and doing for 20 years was not working.”

When she started using Perma Blend, she was blown away by the results. “I could not believe my eyes,” Tina Davies says. “I was getting 90 percent retention. After one month, six months, even a year, I was still seeing the same results.” She wanted to learn everything she could about how Lou and Anne-Marie made pigments.

“In the first conversation we had,” Lou remembers, “Tina and I discussed what she’d been taught about PMU. I told her that those things weren’t true. As a tattoo artist for over 30 years myself, who’s been making pigments for a very long time, I’d realized the same thing when I got into PMU: that none of it was true! I told her to come down to a tattoo show to see for herself.”

“I watched artists tattooing in their booths and asked them if the ink changed color or faded in the skin,” Tina shares. “They looked at me like I was crazy. Of course it wouldn’t! It was a tattoo! Talking to end users, people who were working with the pigments every day, whose work hadn’t changed or faded in a decade, I saw that merging the two worlds—what Perma Blend has successfully done— was the future of PMU. So I asked Lou if he could make a line for me.”

And the rest is history! Perma Blend created a line of natural-looking brow pigments, I Love InkOpens a new window by Tina Davies Pigments. “I wanted to feature pre-modified colors” Tina Davies explains, “because they would make the artists’ lives easier. They wouldn’t have to worry so much about skin undertones and choosing the right pigment for each client. I love Ink by Tina Davies came with a simple color chart that did the matching for them, so there was less chance of a mistake.”

“It was a brilliant idea,” Anne-Marie recalls, “she was thinking of the artist, which is exactly the ethos of Perma Blend. We are artist driven and build our brand around understanding and providing for what the artists need.”

“If you’re a new artist and you’ve been using Perma Blend all along,” Tina says, “you don’t know how lucky you are! I’m so happy to be able to share these amazing pigments with other artists and the industry.”

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Perma Blend is known for high-performing pigments with a high-density load, ensuring expert results without color change. Expect seamless blending when mixing and matching our products, plus the peace of mind that comes from working with quality products.