China Uses 3D Printers for Open Casket Funerals

Everyone has their own idea of the perfect funeral. We all have our own ways of saying goodbye, and there seem to be many preferences that like to pop up. There are many who would prefer to see their loved one one last time. These people tend to want an open casket funeral, but what if your loved one suffered some type of disfiguring injury upon death and could not have an open casket funeral? It could turn out to be that one final straw that makes everything topple. There are many morticians and funeral homes that can reconstruct your loved one’s face. However, the process involves a lot of work using plaster and plastic cement, and this process can take up to a week, which can ultimately delay their funeral. However, a Chinese funeral home may have discovered a better way to go about this process, and it uses state of the art 3D printing technology to reconstruct the faces of the deceased much faster.

It takes an average of three to seven days for a mortician to reconstruct a person’s face using the traditional methods, which consists of using things like embalming fluid, hand stitching, plastic cement and gypsum plaster. However, by using new cutting-edge 3D printing technology, a mortician could easily create an entire facial mold in only half a day, and a partial reconstruct would be much faster, only taking around three to four hours to complete. This advanced 3D printing technology can create these molds swiftly and without much effort. It would be simple for any of the funeral workers to do.

According to the deputy director of 101 Research Institute Li Yuguang, “the funeral worker can simply scan a 2D picture of the deceased into the computer program, and then they can easily create an entire 3D digital model of the deceased person’s face.”

Even though the Babaoshan Funeral Parlor is the first in Beijing to incorporate 3D printing technology to reconstruct the deceased person’s face, 3D printing technology is currently being used in many other areas of the Chinese mortuary industry. Last year, the IB Times reported that the Longhua Funeral Home was the first funeral home in the country to use 3D printing technology to reconstruct bodies of the deceased by making detailed replicas of missing body parts. There is also a huge trend in China to use 3D technology to create urns for cremation, and this trend has also seen some popularity in Japan and the US. This new technology already has multiple uses in the funeral industry, and there is so much more to discover. It will be interesting to see what more can be accomplished through 3D printing.