Being a funeral cosmetologist: creating a bridge between life and death
An interview with Simona Pedicini, discovering a profession that restores dignity and authenticity after death.
As celebrants, we are aware of how important dealing with loss is. Every detail – a word, a flower, a song – can make a difference to those left behind, and honor the history of the deceased with dignity and authenticity, thus helping the grieving process begin.
In this interview, we go one step further and explore the world of mortuary cosmetology, a discipline that gives loved ones a final glimpse of the deceased that is as serene and natural as possible.
We spoke to Simona Pedicini, one of the few mortuary cosmetologists in Italy, who is also a funeral officiant and writer. She is a multifaceted figure with a strong academic background who now works for private individuals and funeral homes and trains others in funeral cosmetology.
Simona tells us about her experience balancing the two dimensions of dying — theoretical and practical— and the challenges of a profession still marred by prejudice. There emerges a profound reflection on death, the importance of commemoration, and the need to restore not only a peaceful appearance, but also respect for the deceased’s identity and history.
FC: How would you define mortuary cosmetology to someone who has never heard of it?
SP: Mortuary cosmetology sometimes called desairology, is a practice that uses products to style or alter the hair, face, and nails to prepare a deceased person for viewing and/or burial, thus providing comfort to family and friends by making their deceased loved one appear as they wish them to be remembered. The products mitigate, and where possible eliminate, signs of death such as pallor, color variations, bruises, blotching, disfigurements caused by trauma or disease. The hygienic, conservative, aesthetic, and reconstructive procedures must be performed according to a strict protocol by specialized personnel. Practitioners start by washing the body, then continue with reconstruction, make-up and styling, and finally they dress the body and place it in the coffin for viewing.
FC: Your work is still little known in Italy. What experiences or encounters led you to embark on this career path?
SP: It was my academic research that took me down the path to this profession. I was specializing in Holy Shroud studies, which taught me the meaning of death as a mystery; the mystery of an absent corpse. I was also researching the history of female mysticism and the history of the anatomy of female saints in the Baroque era. I immersed myself in texts about the bodies of mystics that ecclesiastical authorities used to literally dissect, looking for traces of the devil in them. By stifling the voice of women in life and violating their bodies in death, the male world of the church was thus able to control women.
I knew a great deal about death from a historical, philosophical, anthropological, and theological point of view, but I kept wondering what death was like in real, concrete terms and how a dead body was different from a living one.
While writing an article, I needed a book that I couldn’t find in any library, and after much searching online, I managed to find it in a place I’d never heard of. It was a Canadian funeral home, a Victorian mansion. There were photos of an immense garden where a table had been set up with great care for family and friends to gather together and celebrate the deceased. Every room in the funeral home was beautifully furnished and appointed to meet the needs of the deceased’s entourage, but none of the rooms brought death to mind, including the small library where the book I was seeking for my article was kept.
I began to learn more about this funeral home and others, especially in the United States. I began to understand that there was another way of dealing with death, of dealing with the body and the grief of those left behind. I then looked in Italy for somewhere similar that would allow me to approach death and dying in a concrete, material way. This is where my activity began and where it has continued, uninterrupted, ever since as I dig deeper into the theoretical and practical dimensions of dying.
FC: Funeral cosmetics can be seen as a bridge between death and commemoration: in this respect, there is a great deal in common with the work of a celebrant. How can you help those who have lost a loved one to begin grieving?
SP: By offering an image of the deceased person that is dignified, well taken care of, serene, we play an essential role in the grieving process. Respect for the dead and for the feelings of those left behind is an enormous comfort for family and friends in their final moments of recollection and intimacy with the body. Facial expression, hand posture, and clothing bring back memories with all the physical and personality traits of the deceased intact. This last glimpse is what stays in people’s minds, and is of great comfort for relatives and family members. In this respect, we are ensuring that the deceased are not severed permanently from their lives, that they are still an integral part of the lives and feelings of family and friends, thus facilitating the process of accepting the death.
FC: Your work has a very strong artistic and manual component. How much is technique and how much is creativity when you work on a body?
SP: Mortuary cosmetology gives back what death has taken away; our practice consists of an artistically respectful restitution that cannot and should not attribute to the dead person anything, either in the choice of makeup or dress, that did not belong to his or her personal history. We combine technical aspects, the result of continuous studies based on the most modern scientific knowledge, and artistic aspects that cannot in any way disregard the profound understanding of the psychology of mourning and that must always be respectful of the deceased’s history, personal wishes and family members’ contributions.
FC: Are the products you use environmentally sustainable? Is it possible to practice funeral cosmetology in an eco-sustainable perspective?
SP: I strictly follow three criteria when choosing products: I guarantee the integrity of the body by avoiding substandard products or products that may harm any part of the body being treated; I make sure practitioners are safe, and I choose environmentally sustainable products. Our profession is moving — dare I say fortunately? — increasingly in this direction.
FC: Your work is strongly associated with the wake rather than the funeral. How often do families request a wake in Italy compared to abroad, especially the U.S.? And in northern Italy compared to the south?
SP: Society is speeding up all the time and the same is true in every aspect of our daily life. The idea of devoting time to death has vanished. In the old days, people kept the body at home and received visitors in the house, eating and drinking together, and caring for the body, but that practice has all but disappeared today. Dying in hospital is now the norm abroad and in Italy, in the north as much as in the south.
The intense moment of the wake, with its rich and complex heritage of rituals has become a distant memory everywhere, a subject of study for anthropologists, an object of investigation for documentary filmmakers, but certainly no longer, except in sporadic cases, a heartfelt and lived practice. And although in some foreign countries, foremost the United States, the wake still retains the character of a ceremony with a strong celebratory and festive tone, it is nevertheless true that the trend is to speed things up. People want to dispose of the body as quickly as possible.
FC: In the 2008 Oscar-winning film Departures by Japanese director Yōjirō Takita, the protagonist, a freshly hired funeral cosmetologist, challenges (and ultimately beats) social ostracism and distrust from his wife. How do we "liberate" this profession from the social stigma often associated with it?
SP: Since I took up the profession, several years ago now, I have been waging a battle against the stigma still associated with the figure of the mortician today, and there is hardly any change with respect to the early days of my practice. Handling a dead body not only inspires fear in people—to the same extent as talking about death does—but above all, it disgusts them. We need to teach future cosmetologists, as I do in my training courses, the deepest meaning of death in order to free it from these taboos. We need to free our practice from the idea that we are dealing with nothing but rotting bodies, and we also need to teach future generations that corpses are not just biological matter. They represent the emotional history of the deceased, they are the depository of the deceased’s life, emotions and feelings, as well as those of the people who are left behind.
FC: Do you remember a particular incident where your work radically transformed a family's experience of saying goodbye, making it a more peaceful experience?
SP: I think the experience that most transformed not only the family of the deceased but also
my profession, is an episode that I tell again and again (as I did when I was invited to Women’s Legacy in 2019). It goes back to my earliest days as a mortician. I was working on the body of a transgender woman. She wanted to be buried dressed as a woman. She’d left a pencilled note inside the man’s suit that, once she became seriously ill, she knew the family would pick out for her. A suit that would ensure that she would be presented in the coffin dressed in a way that conformed to the gender nature had assigned to her. The note said: “I am a woman”. I insisted right to the very end with the biological family members —their sense of shame for their daughter’s nonconforming body was stronger than their sense of grief for their loss—that there be one element that represented her express wishes, which they accepted. And so, I painted her nails in bright colors, dipping freely into my make-up and styling kit. The final result was a woman in a man’s suit and tie, with gorgeous nails painted pale pink, fuchsia, and blue. This made the deceased’s chosen family very happy, and they excitedly greeted the casket in a farewell viewing that gave the woman dignity and respect.
FC: This profession will certainly have influenced your relationship with death; how would you define it to this day?
SP: Actually, it was my studies that helped define my concept of death. And it is this concept that has subsequently come to strongly influence my activity. My studies have been, and continue to be centered on the concept of death as a mystery, death as a moment of peaceful light not of despair. Working with dead bodies means being a part of this mystery, which is there in the room where I handle the corpse, which resides in that body and in the history of that body that I never knew in life. It is perhaps the greatest mystery there is and it gives meaning to my relationship to life, to death, to my profession, to my everyday actions.
FC: You also hold training courses; what do you say to young people who enter this profession?
SP: I teach them the need for in-depth study of techniques, but above all I teach them that they have a duty to make sense of the profession they have chosen and to make it meaningful. I teach them how essential it is to understand what death is, what a corpse is, by going beyond the anatomical, medical, or scientific aspect. This is what makes a professional mortuary cosmetologist capable of restoring dignity and respect to the history of the person who has died and to the feelings of those who are left behind.
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