David Lee Roth launches skincare line for tattoo fans

Van Halen singer David Lee Roth is taking a career Jump by launching a skincare line for tattooed fans.
The products from Roth’s new Ink The Original collection will help users maintain and preserve their skin art.
“The product that we’re dealing with now goes hand in hand with what I think is the true Esperanto: It’s a language – ink – that everybody shares, especially if you don’t speak the same language,” the rocker tells Vogue magazine. “With ink, we read each other’s signs and icons. In that way, it’s much like music.”
Roth began developing the line a few years ago and insists it is unique because there’s very little else on the market that caters solely to inked folk.
“I started this project with three of us sitting around an upended plastic bucket for a table at my house in Los Angeles,” he continues. “Now, there’s 34 of us and we have offices in New York, as well as L.A. It’s taken three years and close to $7 million, and I’m involved in every single element of every part of it.
“Surprisingly, there’s almost no competition. And what we have built is absolutely specialised to our community…”
Roth has also immersed himself in the tattoo culture with a massive piece of skin art that took one artist hundreds of hours to complete.
“I got my first tattoo 40 years ago, a little seahorse on my ankle…,” he says. “That was very outre then – the only people who got tattoos then were bikers, rock ‘n’ rollers to a small degree; the gay community was into it.”
“Eventually, though, I took a much more gentrified approach: I waited until I was 60 and got the whole Japanese tuxedo,” the 64 year old adds. “It took me 300 hours of sitting over two years. But I planned it for the 30 years prior, and it’s my design: kabuki faces, the original showbiz, rendered Edo style (period Japanese design) – it looks like a woodblock print.”