I 23(f) have lost two close friends in horrific circumstances over the last few years. Can anyone explain to me why bodies,
particularly faces, looks so different after death – is it because they’ve been embalmed, or is it the human brain not being able to process what they’re seeing infront of them? Apologies if this is too gruesome for this sub, i think this might be me grieving and just trying to find some way to understand why.
In: Biology
Living creatures have a whole hosts of processes that maintain an homeostasis of their bodies, leading to an appearance that we recognise as healthy. After death, those processes cease so the body start undergoing severe transformations, altering their appearance. Bodies get progressively less recognisable with time.
Nowadays, it has become common practice to treat a body for funerals in order to give it a more “living” appearance, but there’s only so much you can do with techniques we have and so, if you look long enough, the façade falls apart.
That’s specially true if the death caused some sort of disfiguration, because even the best workers on the field will try to make them look more like when they were alive, but it’s really difficult to get all the details right, so you might get anywhere from really bad jobs to the uncanny valley level of weirdness.
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