She puts make-up on the dead: mortuary beautician who provides free services to Indonesian families says she ‘made an oath to God’ to help the poor
- Gloria Elsa Hutasoit, who began offering free mortuary beautician services in 2017, says every corpse requires a different treatment according to how they died
- She often uses expired cosmetics donated by benefactors, and even runs private mortuary make-up classes on a pay-as-you-can scheme
Roslina Siahaan was devastated when her beloved aunt died in December 2020 after years battling a chronic illness.
Her aunt, 53, wanted to be interred in her home village, in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, far from where she was living at the time in Bekasi, on the outskirts of the capital Jakarta. An intimate memorial service was arranged for family and friends in Bekasi for the morning before her aunt’s body was shipped to the village. Siahaan wanted her aunt to look her best for the service.
“We called every hospital in the area, but no mortuary make-up artist was available that night,” she remembers. Siahaan finally rang Gloria Elsa Hutasoit, a mortuary make-up beautician based in Jakarta who promotes her free services on Instagram and Facebook.
Hutasoit’s home in east Jakarta is about 25km (16 miles) from the house of Siahaan’s aunt in Bekasi. The mortuary beautician doesn’t have a vehicle and relies on motorbike taxis to get around. It was raining hard that night and it took her almost an hour to arrive.
“When I got there, I felt like crying,” Hutasoit, 37, remembers. “They’re so poor that their house didn’t even have a door.
“It was very difficult to work. The house was narrow and rather dark. Its cement floors were cracked in so many places and there were puddles of water inside.”
