In most cases, moisturizing lotion is applied to the face, lips, and hands. Makeup will be applied to the face, neck, and hands in order to make the person look as alive as possible and cover up any blemishes, discoloration, or marks of illness.
A mortuary cosmetologist is a licensed cosmetologist who performs a variety of cosmetic services to prepare a deceased person for funeral services.
Makeup/Jewelry:
Foundation, a bit of blush and black eyeliner should suffice. Avoid bright lipstick, if any at all. As with clothing, you're makeup should not make you stand out. Jewelry is fine as long as it is kept to a minimum!
It is a common practice to cover the legs as there is swelling in the feet and shoes don't fit. As part of funeral care, the body is dressed and preserved, with the prime focus on the face. Post embalming, bodies are often placed without shoes; hence covering the legs is the way to offer a dignified funeral.
The deceased's face is sometimes covered before the casket is closed to protect it from the inside lid of the casket. If the face does not need protection, it may still be covered at the funeral as a gesture of comfort, out of respect for the body, or due to Catholic tradition. That's the short answer.
What's really returned to you is the person's skeleton. Once you burn off all the water, soft tissue, organs, skin, hair, cremation container/casket, etc., what you're left with is bone. When complete, the bones are allowed to cool to a temperature that they can be handled and are placed into a processing machine.
For the most part, however, if a non-embalmed body was viewed one year after burial, it would already be significantly decomposed, the soft tissues gone, and only the bones and some other body parts remaining.
While some people find comfort in seeing their loved ones as they remember them, it may also be uncomfortable to others. If they have an open casket viewing, make sure you follow proper funeral etiquette: DON'T touch the body under any circumstances. Sometimes the casket has a glass to prevent this from happening.
In a closed casket funeral, the casket remains closed during the viewing and the funeral service. Family members and guests are not able to see the body, and some prefer this option for a variety of reasons.
Undergarments
These are put on first to protect the outer clothing and provide modesty for the deceased.
Although embalming chemical companies manufacture makeup specifically for post-mortem use, several morticians prefer to reach for over-the-counter cosmetics, says Taylor, who is also known as BeforeTheCoffin.
Blood in the hair is removed with washing and chemicals. The funeral director then washes the hair, funeral directors may do this either before or after embalming; Hairdressing is normally done after embalming has been completed. Any hair stubble on the remains is shaved with a razor.
Desairology is an older term for the practices of funeral cosmetology, mortuary makeup, and restorative arts, which are a product of the practice of viewing a deceased person in their open casket prior to burial.
While the funeral director or mortician is charged with actually dressing the body, the clothing is selected by the family. Some families have preferences for what they want their loved ones to wear, and some individuals also include their burial clothing as part of their final wishes.
If the coffin is sealed in a very wet, heavy clay ground, the body tends to last longer because the air is not getting to the deceased. If the ground is light, dry soil, decomposition is quicker. Generally speaking, a body takes 10 or 15 years to decompose to a skeleton.
But by 50 years, the tissues will have liquefied and disappeared, leaving behind mummified skin and tendons. Eventually these too will disintegrate, and after 80 years in that coffin, your bones will crack as the soft collagen inside them deteriorates, leaving nothing but the brittle mineral frame behind.
If you are looking at a long-lasting ground casket, pick a steel or metal casket. If the grave site is low on water content or moisture, metal caskets are known to last even longer, over five decades. Under favorable weather conditions, experts say that metal caskets may even last more than that – up to 80 years.
One of the wildest innovations is “living funerals.” You can attend a dry run of your own funeral, complete with casket, mourners, funeral procession, etc. You can witness the lavish proceedings without having an “out-of-body” experience, just an “out-of-disposable-income” experience.
Many crematoriums offer funeral robes or gowns
Most crematoriums provide these. You might ask for a funeral gown if you're not sure what to dress the person who's died in. At a direct cremation, the body will enter the cremation chamber in the clothes or hospital gown they were wearing.
Unless a casket is made of metal and sealed with a material that won't degrade, bugs will eventually get inside.
To Protect the Corpse from Being Stolen. Snatching dead bodies was common in many parts of England and Scotland in the early 1800s. Therefore, graves were always dug six feet deep to prevent body snatchers from gaining access to the buried remains.
How they place a body in a casket depends on the equipment available to those handling the task. At some funeral homes, they use machines to lift the body and place them into caskets. At other funeral homes, trained staff members simply lift the body and carefully place it.
Cremations last between one and three hours with cooling taking a further one or two hours. This depends on cremation temperatures, the size of the deceased, and coffin material.
We've witnessed many cremations and never heard a scream. But then again, cremation retorts aren't silent either. Now, bodies do make all kinds of gnarly noises.
Does the body sit up during cremation? Yes, this can happen. Due to the heat and the muscle tissue, the body can move as the body is broken down, although this does happen inside the coffin, so it won't be visible.