Annual Report of Cosmetology vol.19, 2011
Synopsis of Original Research Paper

Standardization of Angel care for elderly person anddevelopment of education contents
Yoshihisa Hirakawa
Center for postgraduate clinical training and career development, Nagoya University Hospital

Purpose and Background: At the terminal stage of life or even after the death, paying attention to their appearance
could contribute to improve the quality of life for the elderly themselves, as well as for their family members.
They often call the post obitum treatment “Angel Care” and the embalmer’ art “Angel Make”, which are generallypracticed by nurses.
However, the nurses have little formal training about Angel Care or Angel Make. In most cases, it is theirexperienced senior staffs who teach them how to practice.
Therefore, it would contribute to improve a quality of Angel Care/Make if we develop a practical and standard
methodology to offer such practices to nurses. As those who die at care facilities for the elderly or their homes areincreasing, caregivers, nurses and their family members would be more and more involved in such make-up practice.
To improve a quality of Angel Care/Make, we need to develop more appropriate and organized methodology for allconcerned.
The purpose of this research is to promote standardizing technical know-how of Angel Care/Make for an elderly
person by collaboration with professional beauticians and hairdressers. And at the same time, we aim to develop
educational materials easy to understand and practice for nurses, caregivers and their family members.
Results and Discussions: Research duration was one year, from December in 2009 to November in 2010. This
research has been explored by three working groups. First is the Center for postgraduate clinical training and careerdevelopment, Nagoya University Hospital. The second one is NPO All Japan beautician training Association which
has been studying cosmetic care for elderly persons mainly in Aichi area. And the last one is Doho University Social
welfare Department.
These working groups had addressed 4 tasks in parallel as follows.
1. We develop an Angel Care/Make guideline for all professionals concerned in order to standardize Angel Care/
Make practice.
2. We put together a set of change of appearance around the time of terminal stage by reviewing texts of geriatrics
and legal medicine.
3. We create a conceptual diagram related to Angel Care/Make (4-level Ladder of Beauty Care Model for an ElderlyPerson) based on the knowledge obtained by task 2.
4. We develop an educational Angel Care/Make set of contents which is easy to practice especially for
nonprofessionals (please refer http://hirakawa-lab.org/). The author has already put into practice to make surethat the set of contents works at the official workshop in Center for Postgraduate Clinical Training and Career
Development, Nagoya University Hospital. The 4-level conceptual diagram we have developed shows that apreparation for Angel Care/Make begins well before the terminal stage of life, what reflects to the Angel Care/
Make is how the person becomes self-supporting and how the person could keep his/her personality beautifully.
To obtain a successful Angel Care/Make, we need to help the person to lead his/her own way of life all throughthe consecutive stage to a last moment even after death.
The achievement of this research is as follows.
1) We make people more aware that cosmetology has a strong relation with our quality of life. 2) We open
various application possibilities of cosmetology for medicine, nursing care, and welfare services, which would
contribute to develop a quality of life at not only the end stage of life but also a whole stage of life for an elderly
person. 3) We expect to improve academic value of cosmetology for the elderly if an idea of Angel Care/Makebecome widely recognized in our society and more and more professionals concerned participate in the cosmetology.
In fact, though the above mentioned workshop was not a program for an Angel Make practice, we were requestedby the participants to give more opportunities for them to learn an Angel Make practice. It suggests that we should
respond to such strong needs for learning Angel Make practice from the professionals engaged in the terminal carefor the elderly. And by shedding lights on the Angel Care/Make practice and developing its educational guideline,
we show what we need more to explore in this educational practice.
We hope that the achievement of this research will be verified scientifically in near future.

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