Stella Yeung Pui-pui says she thinks she was meant for her job - and perhaps that is just as well, because not many other people in Hong Kong would want to do it.
Ms Yeung is a cosmetician for the dead - or an embalmer - a career that's almost a taboo in Chinese culture.
For the past 28 years, Ms Yeung has been grooming the deceased at the Kowloon Funeral Parlour. Apart from applying makeup and shaving and hairdressing the dead, the job also involves facial restoration. The procedure is carried out for autopsy cases, decaying bodies and those who died in accidents.
To the veteran cosmetician, it's a far cry from her previous life as a housewife - in fact, it was such an unexpected change of direction, she thinks it must have been fated to happen.
It started when she learned from her husband - who worked in the funeral industry - that an embalming master was looking for an apprentice. In her early 30s and with her children already in school, she took the job as a challenge.
'I never thought much about the nature of the job,' she says. 'I just wanted to know if I could handle it and start working again.'