Submitted by kcshoe14 t3_10hiniy in askscience
For example, if perfumes give me a rash. The mortician sprays my dead body with perfume. Do I break out in a rash?
Submitted by kcshoe14 t3_10hiniy in askscience
For example, if perfumes give me a rash. The mortician sprays my dead body with perfume. Do I break out in a rash?
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Not 100% sure on all allergic reaction mechanisms, but I can tell you anything involving blood moving up to the surface isn't going to happen.
In hives and other rashes, the raised red surface is because your microscopic blood vessels react to let more blood flow into the area.
When you are dead, those tiny blood vessel walls are no longer reacting, and the blood isn't flowing.
In fact, the blood settles on the bottom of your body as it's no longer being kept moving and muscled back from where gravity pulls it - this is called liver mortis.
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No, an allergic reaction requires circulation. The perfume might diffuse into tissue and activate a few surviving mast cells, but the vasoactive chemicals (cytokines and biogenic amines) would have no real effect. Every sustained immune response I can think of requires recruitment of other cells (through circulation). Some tissue-resident phagocytes could maybe become activated through passive diffusion (although this is much less likely without circulation), but any effect they have would be *far* less damaging than the enzymatic reactions already taking place in tissue after death.
[deleted] t1_j5cyxse wrote
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