A mortician with 500,000 TikTok followers shared videos about applying makeup on the dead to remove stigma around death: 'It's just a part of life'

• Heather Taylor was a mortuary makeup artist who gained 500,000 TikTok followers by sharing her work.
• Taylor posted videos about going to mortuary school and how makeup is applied on the dead.

A TikToker who gained 500,000 followers on the platform by posting videos about her work with the dead says she wants to lessen the stigma around death.

Heather Taylor, who goes by the handle Before The Coffin on TikTok, worked as a death care professional demystifying what it's like to be a mortician and dismantling the stigma around death on social media.

The 30-year-old now works as an eye recovery technician, but began her career in the death industry six years ago, when she studied mortuary science and embalming at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science.

She went on to instruct a sculpting and makeup class for facial reconstruction at the school, while working in a funeral home preparing caskets and applying makeup to bodies on rotation.

"It is definitely a calling," she told Insider in an interview. "I felt like I was helping them and that's how I continue to feel with all different aspects of death work.

"It's weird to say that you feel like the dead are your friends in a way. I felt they were safe with me and I did my best. I treated them with the most respect that I possibly could."

She said that some days were harder than others because every case was different.

"I could have a body that has been in the river for a really long time and I might not know much about it until I hear about it from the family," she said adding that many families were very appreciative of her services.

"If I know that somebody is going to see them I will try and go run over and fix them up a little bit so it's less traumatizing. Or if they have some gashes I would repair them just so when they see them they're not completely shocked. It can be rough, especially if you've never seen a dead body before."

Taylor joins a list of death care professionals trying to create transparency around their work on social media because the industry has always been shrouded in secrecy and misinformation, as Insider previously reported.

Amid a shortage of workers in the industry in the US, enrollment in mortuary schools jumped in 2022, per CNN.

"The shortage is so serious right now that there's a 90% job placement rate for graduates of these programs," Leili McMurrough, program director at Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Illinois, told CNN at the time.

Taylor was inspired by her own father's death

Taylor explained that her father's death was a pivotal moment that inspired her to work in the death industry.

"When my father passed, and I tell my students about this all the time, my father drowned and the fish in the river ate parts of his face and I read that on his autopsy report," she said saying that she realized somebody could have "fixed that."

She described going to his funeral: "I never got a chance to see him and it's like my dad's gonna walk out at any time like that closure feeling I never really had. So it's definitely a gift to be able to give that to somebody."

After her father's death, and after her mother lost custody of her, she became legally orphaned. Her sister then won custody of her in court when she was 17.

"My friends have said I'm built for trauma. I've gone through some hard things and I just feel like this job is definitely meant for a specific person and I do feel like that person is me."

She found the death industry appealing because she always had a "dark persona" and an "attraction to darker things."

She said she even worked in a haunted house applying makeup from the age of 14 for eight years.

Her interest in mortuary science partly stemmed from her education in a special effects makeup school where she observed decomposing bodies and attended anatomy classes to study bodies for realistic effects.

She tried to promote death positivity on TikTok

Taylor started making TikTok videos during the COVID pandemic in 2020 to share her experiences in mortuary school.

A typical TikTok video, which could attract over 700,000 likes, showed her students working with prosthetic heads, reconstructing parts of the face, applying hair and makeup, and sculpting features.

A comment on her video says: "So thankful for this work. My dad was in a motorcycle accident and whoever reconstructed him did an amazing job. Wasn't open casket but I got to see."

Her mortuary school ended up launching an online class because of the popularity of her TikToks.

The purpose of her videos was to promote death positivity which means "seeing death in a positive light" and removing the negative stigma around it.

"It's just a part of life, it shouldn't be so scary."