Celebrity Tattoo Artist Bang Bang Launches Forever Care Aftercare Products (Exclusive Details)

Always at the forefront of ideation, celebrity tattoo artist Bang Bang has dropped yet another creation: Forever Care.

The luxury tattoo aftercare line was developed for over a decade while the New York-based artist — whose real name is Keith McCurdy — was “mixing and melting things and packaging” them himself, he tells PEOPLE. He had the ideas, he just needed the right people and all the right pieces to fall into place before rolling the products out into the market.

The result is a three-product collection that consists of Hydrating Balm, Clarifying Lotion and Body Bar. Each piece of the collection has a sleek look in line with the Bang Bang brand. They help heal your tattoos after going through years of rigorous testing with Bang Bang and his team, but they’ll also look gorgeous sitting on your vanity until you get your next tattoo. And because they’re designed for sensitive skin, you can actually use them anytime.

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To put the products to the test, I visited Bang Bang’s studio in New York to get a new tattoo with one of the resident artists. Michelle Santana — who recently tattooed Miley Cyrus — inked a small crown on my arm right above one of my other Bang Bang originals (the magnifying glass).

Santana wrapped my ink in plastic wrap, and she and Bang Bang sent me on my way with my Forever Care and my instructions. Here’s what I’m working with:

• Hydrating Balm ($66): The base ingredient of the stick is charcoal, and this is the primary product that you’ll use on a fresh tattoo three to five times per day to help it heal, Bang Bang says. He adds that the team spent “a lot of time” perfecting this product.
• Clarifying Lotion ($44): The lotion, which he recommends using for up to a month on your fresh tattoo (but really any time, because it’s just a great lotion for sensitive skin), is made fragrance-free and unscented. It’s also thin enough to let your tattoo breathe.
• Body Bar ($22): Also made with charcoal, the soap can be used to gently wash your fresh tattoo, which contains “tiny puncture wounds,” Bang Bang notes. “You need a very simple soap here,” he says.
• Forever Care Kit ($111): With the kit, you get all three products for a discounted price.

“The idea of the stick is to take your hands out of the mix,” Bang Bang says of how he designed the Hydrating Balm. That was my favorite thing about using it. It’s never been easier to take care of a healing tattoo. I kept the stick on my bathroom sink and simply swiped it on a few times a day for the first few days and went about my business. It doesn’t feel greasy, it doesn’t feel heavy, it doesn’t feel like much of anything. As someone who hates the feeling of anything on my skin, the texture was perfect.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a tattoo heal so seamlessly as this one did using Forever Care. Though the tattoo was small and fine, it healed beautifully with the Hydrating Balm. During those first few days, I was also washing with the Body Bar. I’m normally not a fan of bar soap, because I just find them to be annoying, and I prefer a liquid soap, but for the sake of testing everything I used it. I lathered it in my hands and rubbed it on my skin to clean off my tattoo and appreciated how clean it felt. That feels like an oxymoron, but not all soaps will actually make your skin feel clean, and this one does. It also felt gentle and non-drying.

After five days, I started using the lotion, which, as promised, did feel very light over top of my tattoo. I can admit that I am a lotion hater, so I probably wouldn’t use this outside of trying to heal my punctured skin wounds, but at least it didn’t feel suffocating. There is also blessedly no heavy smell, so I never even noticed it was there, which is my favorite kind of lotion.

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Bella Carino, chief operating officer at Bang Bang, assisted the tattoo artist in bringing this project to life. She tells PEOPLE that two of the most important components with Forever Care were the sustainability aspect and the charity aspect.

“The exterior [of the packaging] is aluminum, and the interior is highly recycled plastic,” she explains. “Our next version of this, we want to be able to disassemble it and recycle. We have a recycling initiative as well: If you bring back the bottles, we give you a discount on your next order. We’ve seen how big of an impact plastic is in this industry.”

As for the philanthropy, Bang Bang partners with Camp Wonder, part of the Children’s Skin Disease Foundation, near Atlanta. Every year, some of the staff go and help out, and now they’re donating a portion of each sale of Forever Care to the camp.

“A lot of these kids, one of the more severe skin diseases that they have is they lack the enzyme that produces our outer layer of skin,” Carino says. “So when you fall and you scrape, it’s that raw red skin. And then we don’t even think about the fact that our skin just heals itself and we’re back to normal. They have that, their whole body’s that, so they’re being wrapped head-to-toe multiple times a day. And the families as well, many are low-income, and that’s quite a significant expense, obviously, to handle that. We’re really, really proud to partner with them, and it’s a really incredible organization.”

Forever Care is available at Bang Bang’s New York location as well as online.