What I Learned About Beauty From Doing Makeup for the Dead

I recently heard that a woman had died. My first thought was how young she was. My second was her child. And then funeral service did what funeral service has done to my brain: I pictured the preparation room where a funeral director would embalm and prepare her body.

I hate admitting that, but this profession teaches you to walk into the room everyone else is trying not to imagine.

I wondered what photographs her family would bring to show the funeral director what she should look like. Which version of her they would choose? What would they need to see in order to recognize the person in the casket?

And then I wondered how many people it might take to get her there. Because as anyone who’s walked past a Sephora lately knows, beauty is so much more than a little lipstick, some rouge, and a curling iron. These days, hair is dyed, highlighted, extended, chemically straightened, and maintained according to a precise formula. Eyebrows are waxed, filled, laminated, tattooed, and microbladed. Lips are lined and filled. Eyelashes are lifted, tinted, extended, and replaced one tiny strand at a time. Nails are acrylic, gel, tips, designs and a particular shape she may have worn for years—or just adopted last week.

So much labor exists behind a face the rest of us experience as effortless. A hairstylist knows the color. A lash technician knows the length. A nail artist knows the shape. An injector may know the placement. The funeral director—who has inherited an entire beauty routine—likely knows none of it.

When a woman dies, I am not merely restoring her features but trying to reconstruct a carefully maintained identity whose instructions may have disappeared with her. And when the family says, “Make her look like herself,” they may not realize how many living hands it once took to create the version of her they are asking to see.

We may be working from photographs of several years and several faces at once. Her daughter may remember the lashes, the filled lips, and the carefully shaped brows. Her sister may remember the face underneath them. Her mother may still see her at 20.

Funeral directors can perfect the eyebrows, smooth every uneven tone, add lashes, contour the cheeks, and create beautiful symmetry and get a woman completely wrong.

And we are standing there trying to decide which version of this woman belongs in the casket. I have seen what happens when warmth, expression, and movement are gone. I have stood over a woman whose family would have given anything to see one more line form beside her mouth. One more uneven smile. One more expression that belonged only to her. Except now there is no warm skin. No circulating blood. No hydrated tissue responding the way it did in a salon chair. She cannot look in the mirror and say, “Not that blonde,” “My brows are more arched,” or “Those lashes are too long.” She cannot tell us which parts made her feel beautiful and which parts she believed were needed before she stepped into the world each day.

For her “Ask Ugly” column at The Guardian, beauty journalist Jessica DeFino detailed the increasingly widespread practice of using fat from donor cadavers for implants, filler, and injectables. DeFino delved into the troubling practice of turning dead bodies into sources of beauty and observes that in these cases, “Death, quite literally, becomes you.” I was struck by another irony: While the aesthetics industry is considering how death can contribute to modern beauty, funeral service has barely adjusted to how profoundly women alter their appearances during life.

We customize our faces while living but rarely document those choices for death, and so funeral directors can perfect the eyebrows, smooth every uneven tone, add lashes, contour the cheeks, and create beautiful symmetry and get her completely wrong.

If her daughter walks into the room, looks into the casket and says, “That doesn’t look like my mother,” it does not matter how beautiful the work is. In death, a family is not asking us for the most beautiful version of their loved one. They are asking for their loved one.

When I first became a funeral director, I wore concealer, eyeliner, blush, and eyebrow filler. I waxed. I plucked. I tanned. I kept my nails done.

But after enough time spent studying the faces of people whose families loved even the “imperfect” details, I learned to love my own imperfections.

The change happened slowly, but now I roll out of bed most days and have to remind myself slippers are not to be worn in public.

This was not some dramatic rejection of makeup. I didn’t decide beauty was shallow or that women who enjoy cosmetics were wrong. I like feeling put together and understand that makeup can be fun, a tool of artistic self-expression.

I have chosen not to surgically alter my face or body. There is comfort in knowing that the photographs my family will give the funeral director will look like me.

But funeral service taught me there is a difference between decorating yourself and becoming uncomfortable with the face underneath. A surprising number of the men and women who are especially good at funeral makeup and hair have a similarly natural look. They have not trained their eyes to look at every face and immediately start correcting it.

I have also chosen not to surgically alter my face or body. It’s a personal choice, not a moral one, and I’m not interested in telling other women what to do. But for me, there is comfort in knowing that the photographs my family will give the funeral director will look like me. My children will not have to explain which version of my face they are hoping to see. When they see me for the last time, they will know me.

The people who love you are learning your face right now, the lines beside your mouth as evidence that you laugh, the expression you make before telling a raunchy joke, the nose your ancestors gave you. The features you scrutinize in the mirror are the same ones they use to recognize you.

My mother was beautiful. I don’t think she ever knew that, not in the way the rest of us knew it.

She had Botox, lip filler, and breast implants. For years, I watched the maintenance become another expense she struggled to afford. When one implant ruptured, she spent nearly a year hating her body while she waited until she could afford to have it repaired.

It was not the change in her appearance that hurt me. My mother was my first mirror. When she treated her own face and body as a collection of problems requiring correction, I learned to examine mine with the same suspicion. I came from her. Every feature she rejected made me wonder what I had inherited, and every procedure reinforced the idea that a woman’s natural body was something she was expected to improve if she could afford to.

Her body had become the standard against which she measured mine, even while she was spending money trying to escape it. After I had children, she remarked that she had never gotten stretch marks as badly as I had.

When I was 12 and she wanted the brown birthmark on my chin removed, I thanked my father for giving it to me. I do not believe my mother intended to teach me self-loathing. I think she was repeating the lessons she had already learned about herself.

DeFino calls our fascination with ageless, poreless, nearly lifeless perfection “the morgue gaze.” But when my mother arrived from the medical examiner’s office, I encountered its inverse. She had chosen her lashes, her hair color, her extensions, the face she presented to the living, and death had begun taking those choices from her. My job was not to make her beautiful. It was to return her to the woman she had chosen to be.

She was still inside the body bag. I had opened those bags before. I knew how to transfer her, bathe her, and assess what needed attention. My training moved my hands while the rest of me tried to ignore the fact that this was my mother.

I knew how to transfer her, bathe her, and assess what needed attention. My training moved my hands while the rest of me tried to ignore the fact that this was my mother.

I barely recognized her. We had been estranged for several years. It looked like she’d had a nose job. Her lips were fuller, and her eyelashes were thicker. Her hair extensions were a mess, and her natural roots had grown in. I knew the face I remembered but not the face she had created while we were apart.

I looked at her skin, her features, and everything death and transportation had altered like a funeral director. I bathed and dressed her, then replaced the false eyelashes that had come loose. Her Botox and filler affected how I restored color and fullness to her face. Funeral service is still learning to navigate injection sites and the changes cosmetic procedures leave beneath the skin. My mother’s roots needed filling and her extensions needed fixing. When I began brushing her hair, my professional distance collapsed. I cried. I talked to her. With her hair in my hands, I finally began mourning my mother.

At the visitation, my grandmother chose not to see her. A viewing is not an obligation. Preparation gives the people who need it the chance to see their person and understand that they are gone.

When the work we have done becomes part of the faces our families recognize, the work stops being merely cosmetic. My mother had spent years trying to correct a body she believed was failing her. In the preparation room, at 42, she was several different versions of herself.

My mother’s extensions, hair color, Botox, and filler had become part of her face, but they had not erased the face her family remembered underneath. I had to account for both. Because what is beauty if not recognition in the eyes of those seeing us for the last time? In the preparation room, I was not aiming for flawlessness. I was looking for my mother.

Kora MichaudWriter

 Kora Michaud is a funeral director, writer, and mother of three who has spent much of her adult life learning about living from the dead. Her work explores grief, womanhood, motherhood, beauty, and what happens when women stop merely surviving their lives and start deciding what they want from them. Her writing has appeared in national funeral-service publications and the National Association for Children of Addiction. She is currently writing her first book.