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Apple Watch HATES tattoos: Inky pink sinks rinky-dink sensor

Apple in 'Won't Work With Hipster Body Art' shocker

The Apple Watch can't figure out if the wearer has a pulse when worn on a tattooed wrist, Register reader Michael Lovell tells us.

All is well on his un-inked left wrist, but when he switches to the right, "the wrist detection is playing up," he said, as the watch "keeps asking for the passcode." Michael made the video below to illustrate the issue:

Michael's not alone: Redditor guinne55fan has encountered the same problem.

“So I thought my shiny new 42mm SS watch had a bad wrist detector sensor,” 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.”

guinne55fan then “decided to try holding it against my hand and it worked. 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 explains that the Watch uses LEDs to detect how much blood is coursing through your veins, but that various factors can mean the device won't get a reading. Speculation suggests the pigments in the two chaps' tattoos might be preventing the Watch from being able to see inside their veins, leading the device to assume it's not being worn and therefore not issuing notifications. Natural pigments appear not to have any effect on the Watch.

As it happens, guinne55fan says the Watch is buggy in other ways, too.

“Overall I'm having other issues with it that are not tattoo related that I'm more upset about, spotty notifications with messages, no email notifications, I can receive calls on the watch but I can't make them, those issues are bothering me more,” he wrote in the comments following his initial post.

Apple support, he says, has been useful addressing all his issues.

Lovell's so keen on his watch he says he just wants to keep using it, rather than visit an Apple store to seek support. ®

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