Prepping a funeral is not a particularly pleasant activity. You're already dealing with grief, for one thing, and there's a lot of nitty gritty (and unforeseen expenses) that goes into booking a funeral home, transporting a body, and getting friends and family to the venue on time. But it appears the modern age has come up with a way to jazz up a day of gloom — introducing glitter coffins, which are exactly what they sound like.
The United Kingdom-based Glitter Coffin Company has been producing sparkling coffins for the last year now. According to Metro UK, the company is helmed by husband and wife duo Chris and Dawn Nicholls, who had previously been manufacturing glitter-covered furniture via the Glitter Furniture Company, which they also ran (that company was a favorite of UK celeb Katie Price's, who had them craft glitter-covered gear for her apartment).
For some reason, coffins seemed like the obvious next step. "‘I decided one day to do something different, we’ve had The Glitter Furniture Company for two years and I wanted to progress," Chris Nicholls told Metro.
Indeed, the natural progression from furniture for the living is furniture for the dead, and Nicholls started to research how to glitter-bomb coffins. "I decided I would buy a coffin and cover it in glitter to see what it would look like," Nicholls said to Metro UK. "My wife was surprised to find me googling a coffin on our family eBay account after I had the idea."
And so, the glitter coffins were born. "I then spoke to John at the Wyatt Brother’s funeral directors," Nicholls said to Metro UK. "Working closely with them, we had one made up and it just spoke for itself — when I brought it out of the van, the sun was shining and it just dazzled."
'This was about a year ago but we've only just started to promote the business now as we had to wait for the coffins to pass the FFMA coffin testing requirements for them to be able to be used for cremation and burials."
They do look very nice:
Coffins come in a slew of sparkly colors: pink, blue, black, gold, silver, purple, and orange, to name a few. You can also order glitter-covered ashes boxes for cremations, which run about $226 (coffins are made to order, and are priced accordingly) and are hand-finished with silver nail trim.
The coffins are actually super fancy, and according to the Daily Mail, the Nichollses use the same glitter on their coffins that you'd find on the likes of Jimmy Choo shoes. And though the Nichollses are based in Plympton in the UK, you can get a custom glitter coffin shipped to you anywhere in the world, though you'll have to get your funeral home director to make the order. "We don't take orders as such, it's supply to trade only — we want funeral directors to still give the whole package to a family when someone passes away. What we suggest is if the funeral director doesn't have one of our examples then ask them to contact us directly," Chris Nicholls told the Daily Mail.
So far, the Nicholls team has sold about 15 coffins to people worldwide, which might not sound like a hefty toll, but is certainly a good start to a new trend. Though I can't imagine caring about what kind of coffin I'll be buried in (I'll be dead, after all), if you want to shuffle off this mortal coil in style, I can't think of any better way to do it than be encased in bling. Though I'd hate to see the surrounding grave dirt when it starts to decompose.
