[ANON POST] Bleaching a Corpse

[orange_fell]

Search terms: bleaching a corpse, turning a corpse white, bleaching hair and skin, variations thereof. Turned up a lot of costuming suggestions

Comments

[umlautless]

That's what I was thinking: Bleach the hair and the paint the skin white. Especially if it's going to be seen from a distance.

[nineveh_uk]

This. Or talc. Cheap, sprinkle it over the corpse, job done very quickly.

[anonymous]

I'm less keen on anything that can come off on someone's hands. It's not that far a distance. :)

[donutsweeper]

There's an episode of "DIrty Jobs" where Mike Rowe visited Skulls Unlimited and saw/worked on the process of preparing animal skeletons for educational displays and from what I remember they went through bleaching them too.

That part of the episode can be watched here:
http://www.skullsunlimited.com/videos/1/Dirty-Jobs-with-Mike-Rowe.htm

Ah, never mind, I misread, you want the corpse bleached, not the skeleton.

[beccastareyes]

The hair of a corpse should behave the same way as the hair of a living person: outside of the follicles, hair is dead tissue even on a living person. This is why you can bleach it safely, while, say, tattoo ink requires more oversight.

[channonyarrow]

If you bleach, like with household bleach, hair, you're much more likely to destroy it than not - it will literally frizzle off the skull, and you can get nasty chemical burns, though I don't know how that would play out on a corpse.. You can get that effect with commercial hair bleaches, too. For the bodies, I'm not an expert, but I'd worry that you'd need to have extremely precise timing or you're going to either have no effect or you'll have mush. Is it near-future enough that there's a cache of makeup somewhere so that you could use powder? Or, in a pinch, would any sort of stone dust work?

[nuranar]

I was hoping someone would mention the problem with too much bleach, particularly for hair. A good textile fiber test for wool (keratin, which includes hair and fingernails) involves putting a small square of the fabric in chlorine bleach for some hours. The wool will break down completely, leaving behind only the plant or synthetic fibers that were part of the blend, if it was not 100%.

[channonyarrow]

It's about three years After the End, so while it's possible they might have kept makeup, they're much more focused on storing useful things. (And they move around a lot.)

I also don't want it coming off. :)

[sirriamnis]

I want to say the serial killer in The Cell (pretty movie with loads of plotholes in it) with Jennifer Lopez bleached his victims. But I'm not sure how good the "science" for that was.