Left: no heart-rate reading or skin contact, right: working fine
If you have tattooed wrists and are thinking about ordering an Apple Watch, you may want to try one first. A Reddit thread is reporting that the watch can fail to read heartbeats, or even fail to detect skin contact at all, on some people with heavily-tattooed wrists. This has been backed-up by some Twitter users.
The issue isn’t affecting everyone with tattoos, and reports seem to suggest that solid areas of darker inks – like red and black – and most likely to be affected. The issue is specific to tattoo inks: skin color has no impact.
If the watch fails to detect your skin, you can turn off wrist detection in the companion app, but the watch will then no longer support Apple Pay. The person who started the Reddit thread also reported that notifications no longer arrived without skin contact detection, something I’ll be testing this evening when wearing it outside a cycling jacket.
Can only be a matter of time before someone tries to blow this up into #tattoogate …
Photos: Left, Guinne55fan; right, Luc Vandal
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None of these photos show that the Apple Watch stays locked. Even if there were photos with padlocks on it, they could have shot when undressing the watch and then dressing it again. At one of the Reddit posts I proposed to “guinne55fan” that he makes a small video to prove his claim but my proposal was downvoted.
I don’t say that it cannot be like this but just their words and these photos are not a proof of their claim.
Yep, there are multiple reports, but it’s just reports at this stage.
Sorry, forgot to specify. Left wrist is heavily tattooed. Right wrist is blank. I was gonna make a video to show it, but that guy beat me to it. I even went to the apple store and none of them could believe it and they wanted to send it off for a week to get looked at, but I opted not to seeings as though a new one would behave the exact same way.
They definitely did not know about the glitch and were pretty stunned about the whole deal at the genius bar.
I can confirm that this problem is indeed real. I noticed it when my Apple Watch came in last friday. I have to type in the password each and every time I raise my wrist.
It works fine on my right wrist, but I am not left handed, so i don’t wear it there.
Its honestly not a huge deal, just a glitch.
I would like to know if anyone is reporting that they feel an electrical current up the arm the watch is on? I have been wearing the watch for 4 days and I have a dull ache from the wrist up the arm like an acupuncture treatment. Taken the watch off to see if it clears…..
Since the heartbeat detection works using light shining through the top skin layers and detecting the reflection, it would make sense if tattoo ink – which sometimes still contains metal oxyds and stuff – could interrupt this process.
Wouldn’t call this a #gate, it’s the way this device works.
We wouldn’t complain about the iPhone not reacting to our fingernails, it uses electric current to detect contact, fingernails are non-conducting, it’s just how this technology works..
“The issue isn’t effecting everyone with tattoos, and reports seem to suggest that solid areas of darker inks – like red and black – and most likely to be affected.”
Affecting. How do editors not catch this? It’s grating to read.
Particularly odd that I got it right in the second half of the sentence while still managing to get it wrong in the first! Thanks for pointing it out, now fixed.
Well, mom did say I’d regret getting a tattoo sooner or later…
So… What should Apple do about this? It’s not their fault. They can’t account for every life choice that someone makes. Put the watch on an arm that isn’t tattooed, or return it for a refund. Problem solved. Moving along now. Nothing to see here.
Which choice will be obsolete faster the tribal tattoo or the Apple Watch 1.
I have both relatively hairy arms and a good area of my right wrist covered in solid black tattoo ink. I switched the watch to my right hand and placed it right over the tattoo, opened up the heart rate glance, and it measured my heart rate just fine. Not only did it read my heart rate without issue, it was also as accurate as it is when placed on my left wrist which is just as hairy but void of any ink.
For comparison, I also manually measured my heart rate and compared my measurement with the watch on both wrists and there were no significant gaps between the four measurements.