Apple Watch WON’T Work on Tattooed Skin

Apple Watch WON'T Work on Tattooed Skin
Photo from Mirror

Apple fans have been dying to get their hands on the latest craze that hit the tech market: the Apple Watch.

The latest gadget from the makers of iPhone and iPad was specifically designed to organize seamless interaction between the users’ iPhones and the highly-coveted watch— letting the users receive notifications about their messages, e-mails, and all others right on their wrists, instead of having to take out their phone from their pockets (or bags) ever so often.

Apple Watch is a product of Apple’s attempt to get a cut from the growing market of smart watches— a market that Pebble and Samsung used to dominate, where Sony was once not too far behind.

The much-awaited smart watch from the tech giant was just launched a few weeks ago, and the product seemed to have proven itself extremely successful, where the first batch to come out in the market appeared to have been sold out even before the product itself was officially released by Apple.

But the company’s first-ever smart watch appears to have been giving inked Apple users problems that merit a lot of head-scratching.

Numerous users from social media sites like Reddit and Twitter have been complaining that the Apple Watch does not work on tattooed skin.

Apple’s smart watch uses a green LED light that flashes to detect how much blood is flowing through the veins of the user’s wrist, which it calculates in order to get an estimate of the user’s heart rate.

But it appears that the ink patterns on the skins of users with tattoos on their wrists actually interfere with the infrared and green light being emitted by the device, rendering their smart watches unable to calculate their actual heart rate.

Apple’s smart watch seems to be having problems trying to recognize if it has already made contact with human skin, if the users wearing it have tattoos on their wrists.

What’s even worse, inked Apple Watch users also reported that the basic features of the smart watch also refuse to function normally on their tattooed skin.

One Reddit user by the name of guinne55fan wrote:

“The watch would lock up every time the screen went dark and prompted me for my password. I wouldn’t receive notifications. I couldn’t figure out why especially since the watch was definitely not losing contact with my skin.”

“My hand isn’t tattooed and the Watch stayed unlocked. Once I put it back on the area that is tattooed with black ink the watch would automatically lock again.”

Apple is yet to comment on this latest issue.

1 Comment

  • troutski says:

    It’s a big problem for Apple, but it’s not that surprising considering a lot of fitness trackers and smartwatches (with fitness tracking features) tend to use the green LED lights and infrared. So a lot of trackers get messed up when users have tattoos on their wrists or have something else on the wrist with the smartwach or fitness tracker. This is something that Apple should have user tester for and known about long ago, though. This shouldn’t have even been an issue.

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