[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

[salustra]

Hydrogen peroxide works on hair while alive therefore I assume when dead. Skin- no clue.

[ffutures]

Beat me to it - hydrogen peroxide turns the surface layer of cells white; 20 volume (the strength sold for hair use etc.) will do this quite well, but the stronger types (e.g. 50 or 100 volume) are actually corrosive so you would have to be a bit careful not to destroy things too much.

One point - it'd turn the surface of eyes white too.

[salustra]

OP here; that's even better. They're trying to mimic the effects of a chemical weapon that also blinds people.

[majolika]

[beesandbrews]

Hair products are peroxide based, but if you strip dark hair it might turn orange afterward and then need to be dyed. Some people just don't go blond, let alone white.

As for skin I'd think paint or powder would be your best bet. The commercial products for liver spots etc take time to work and you'd need a massive amount to do a body, plus you'd be fighting the effects of decomposition.

[beesandbrews]

Wigs are a possibility; it's just not likely that these people would have easy access to them. And there's the potential of them falling off, which would be seen at a distance.

[anonymous]

Is there a reason why the costuming suggestions aren't feasible? Makeup seems to me like it would be the simplest way to lighten a corpse's skin, especially if you don't need the effect to look natural from close up.

[anonymous]

I'm not completely ruling them out, but everyone's been living underground for awhile and they're much more likely to horde potentially useful chemicals than they are makeup.

[tabaqui]

So, dystopian future - if the surface of your world is poisoned/toxic/whatever, you could just handwave some kind of chemical in surface water or something that, if a body falls into it, bleaches it out and then dissolves it. Then your people can have the fun of hauling corpses around and watching them to not turn into goo, as well as putting on spiffy, cobbled-together protective gear to keep the stuff off *them*.
:)

Or, you know...paint. Or mannequins, of they can scrounge some.

[tabaqui]

OP: Probably should have mentioned this in the post itself, but they're mimicking the effects of a deadly chemical that does do that. The chemical itself is no longer readily available but they're trying to convince people that it is.

[tabaqui]

Ah.
Perhaps they found a little cache of it?

[tabaqui]

It's way deadly and tends to stick around such that parts of the city are still uninhabitable because of it. I'm building up to having the characters do some morally reprehensible things later on, but this is their first big strike, when they're operating under the impression that they're the good guys. :)

[parmalokwen]

They're living underground? One thing they'll have plenty of, then: Rock. If they're living in natural caves, then the rock around them is likely to be limestone, which grinds up nice and white and should work fine for sprinkling all over whatever you need to whiten, as long as the bodies aren't handled by their discoverers.

[parmalokwen]

I remember reading that some Germanic tribes in Roman times used to colour their hair a white as a sort of "war paint" by using a kind of pomade made of soap and limestone or chalk. I remember because this was supposedly the original use for soap, and the use as a detergent came later. (If you're wondering, the purpose was to make themselves look more alien, and more importantly, more uniform, so that the Romans couldn't distinguish between individual fighters in battle. Which apparently made the tribespeople more scary to the Romans.)

Of course, this would also make the hair stiff like a modern hair gel. But combed down and at a distance, you probably wouldn't be able to tell that from normal post-apocalyptic greasyness.