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
We have a whole part of the brain dedicated to recognizing faces; so when someone’s face doesn’t match memory we are very quick to notice
After death the face changes due to dehydration and complete loss of muscle tension.
One, they replace all the blood with embalming fluid so colors are not quite right, they apply makeup, and could also be the differences in skin hydration postmortem. That’s all I got, not a professional.
Part of the reason I’ve found is that there is no movement. The little twitches and breathing and everything else is gone. Plus there is no more blood flow leaving them paler and the color being just generally off. All of these things make your brain freak out. It looks like a person that you know, but it’s off but not for obvious reasons.
(I work in palliative care) A lot of our face muscles are well toned due to all the expressions we make. Because they are so naturally ‘buff’ we flex then a most of the time to make ‘appropriate social face’ (this is why when people are told they have ‘resting mean person face’ they can actually work to adjust it.
So when we die those muscles go slack and our expression changes into nothingness, the absence of expression.
Perhaps not your friends case, but for people who died of a disease (like cancer) there’s also sudden weight loss which causes less fat in the face and saggier skin as their body didn’t have time to adjust to the new weight.
If it was, for example, after a car accident there could be injuries to the face that make them look odd. If your friends wer embalmed (you didn’t clearly say they were but did mention it) then there’s also the embalmer working against tissue swelling, those relaxed muscles and not doing their make up (if they wore any) quite right because it’s someone else doing it. Aka maybe friend filled in her brows less so it just looks slightly different.
Subjectively: I’m sorry for your loss. Death is a hard thing to grapple with at any age but especially in the ‘we are immortal’ phase in early 20s! Try have a favourite photo of them accessible in your phone and when you remember how they looked wrong after death pull up that photo.
Your brain is very good at recognizing patterns and layouts it has seen before. The surface layout is the same, but below the appearance of the body, millions of processes hum and buzz to keep us moving. Those processes are as important to the personhood of a body as the structure and layout are. Like just seeing the framing of a house. It’s why you can usually tell twins apart even if they are completely identical after you learn things about them as individuals.
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It can be attributed to a phenomenon called “uncanny valley”.
When we see cute unrealistic humans, animals or robots in a cartoon we like them, they’re obviously not real but they’re cute, to our brains they feel like cute human babies for which people have natural instinct of taking care of. Let’s assume that kind of “thing” is level 1 on “spectrum”, imagine characters like dogs from cartoon Blue.
They can be little less unrealistic but still out there, think of characters from The Simpsons, they’re humans but all are yellow, have weird shapes etc, “level 2”
We can get a little more realistic, think The Last Airbender, lvl 3
etc…
We can go to level 4, 5, 6, eventually arrive at a realistic looking game like Red Dead Redemption 2. Problem comes when something looks almost like human, so similar you can’t tell it’s not actual human at the first glance, but something feels off, that gap between “characters from peak of realistic looking video games” to “actual human” is what we call uncanny valley. Embalming, unhealthy looking skin or the makeup, body positioned in an odd way (some corpses have their jaw broken to be closed in a casket, it can look odd) all combined with stiffness of the corpse, causes the uneasiness which makes their look feel off.
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.
The main answer is skin color. Your skin is covered with tiny blood capillaries which give our skin that sort of brightness that a dead body doesn’t have. Your skin gets pale and ashen when you don’t have blood circulating to it. Even in darker skinned people the difference is apparent. We’ve actually evolved to be quite good at recognizing this even when it’s subtle.
An inflated balloon with a unique shape (non-sphere) looks different than one that is just slightly/barely inflated , and very different when fully deflated and on the table.
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