Matthew Miller has thought about getting a tattoo, but he’s never been able to commit to one.
One day last summer while relaxing at Barton Springs, Miller and some friends started talking about how they’ve all wanted a tattoo but were reluctant to do something permanent.
A doctoral student in chemical engineering and National Science Foundation graduate research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Miller started thinking about the idea of semi-permanent tattoo ink.
“I thought, I can probably design a product with the skills that I have,” he said.
Oxymoron Ink is the startup born out of that idea. Miller incorporated the company in March. Miller has some working prototypes.
Oxymoron is seeking to develop ink that will last for six months, a year and 18 months.
“My first thought, was let’s use these well-known materials and add some dye in there,” he said. “They faded way too quickly. There have been a lot of steps along the way to figure out what I needed to modify.”
The goal is not only to develop an ink that degrades over time but “fades in a way that is aesthetically pleasing,” he said. “A lot of our process has been trying to optimize the ink. We want it (six-month ink) to look relatively similar for four to five months, then degrade fairly rapidly.”
It plans to sell ink directly to tattoo artists — not consumers. Oxymoron Ink tattoos would be applied the same way as traditional tattoos — with needles.
Oxymoron has applied for a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program. It also has participated in the Student Entrepreneur Acceleration and Launch program at UT.
“We should hear back in the next couple months and ideally would start this fall. The next steps are pilot scale manufacturing and animal testing,” Miller said, explaining that pig skin is the closest to human skin.
Oxymoron wants to see how quickly the inks degrade over time on pigs.
Miller hopes to launch the inks at the end of 2021 or early 2022.
Oxymoron won $15,000 for taking first place in the Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition in May. It also was one of three $1,000 winners for best elevator pitch.
The $250,000 grant would cover animal testing. Oxymoron would need to raise an additional $1 million to $1.5 million in venture capital to go to market, he said.
Miller has met with potential customers, and “they are super excited about it,” he said. “For artists, this opens up a whole new market they wouldn’t have otherwise — people who want to use a tattoo as self-expression but don’t want to have to worry about the permanence of it.”
Semi-permanent ink also allows people to try out the placement of a particular tattoo that they might want to have done permanently.
Miller plans to get a tattoo made with Oxymoron Ink, but he hasn’t decided what or where it will be.
One idea is Oxymoron’s logo.
