Luxury in 2025 is personal. It’s not just about how much you paid for something, but what that thing means. And in an age where everything is commodified and mass-produced, it’s not just about getting your hands on a six-figure watch or the perfect diamond.
These days, luxury is going quiet.
Really quiet.
Deathly quiet.
We’re talking about taxidermy. Not in a creepy, horror-movie sense, but a bespoke, emotionally charged, quietly artistic charm. In fact, taxidermy might be one of the most meaningful forms of luxury you’ve never considered.
From decorative taxidermy like framed butterflies and little ducklings in teacups (we’ll show you in a bit) to pet preservation that memorialises beloved pets after they pass, taxidermy has emerged as a growing niche that’s emotional, artistic, and very much alive in Singapore.
At the heart of animal preservation in Singapore is Black Crow Taxidermy & Art, Singapore’s only commercial taxidermy studio. I paid a visit to co-founders Vivian and Jivan, the husband-and-wife team behind the studio, to see how something that starts with death could end up redefining what it means to live with luxury.
Content warning: This article discusses death and contains images of preserved animals, which some readers may find sensitive or distressing.
Is taxidermy a luxury?
- It’s not just taxidermy
- What kind of qualifications do you need to become a taxidermist?
- What kind of experience do you need to actually do it?
- How much can taxidermy be worth?
- Behind the price: labour, deadlines, and detail
- Why preserved animals don’t lose value
- What makes old taxidermy more valuable
- Taxidermy isn’t just luxury—it’s legacy
- Luxury, redefined
1. It’s not just taxidermy
Most of us know the word “taxidermy”—it’s the one that sticks. It conjures images of mounted deer heads and glassy-eyed birds frozen mid-flight. But in the world of animal preservation, taxidermy is only the tip of the iceberg.
She walks me through the wider spectrum of post-life preservation methods she uses at Black Crow Taxidermy & Art:
- Taxidermy: The most recognisable form—preserving the outer skin of an animal and mounting it in a lifelike pose.
- Mummification: A dry technique that removes moisture but retains all internal organs.
- Diaphonization: Also called “clearing and staining”—a method that renders the body translucent while dyeing the skeleton vivid colours.
- Wet preservation: Specimens are submerged in clear fluid (usually ethanol or glycerin), preserving the animal in its full form, jarred and intact.
- Skeletal preservation: Vivian’s current favourite, and also the most difficult method. Every bone is cleaned, degreased, and reassembled to showcase the animal’s raw structural elegance.
Each method demands precision, calm, and quiet focus—qualities that come naturally to Vivian. But not necessarily to Jivan.
“She handles the creative side. I handle all the other aspects of running a business,” Jivan says. When I ask if he’s ever tried his hand at preservation, he laughs: “I don’t have the patience for it.”
“He’ll remind me of when the pieces are due,” Vivian adds.
You could say Vivian brings the animals back to life, while Jivan helps them stay alive as a business.
2. What kind of qualifications do you need to become a taxidermist?
Bringing animals back to life—even just visually—is no mean feat. What does it actually take? Is taxidermy something you can study? Get certified in?
Short answer: No.
“Currently there are no official degree or anything that you can take to become a taxidermist,” Jivan explains.
The field is largely unregulated. There’s no fixed curriculum, no licence, and no formal qualification that makes someone a taxidermist. But that doesn’t mean the work is improvised—or easy.
3. What kind of experience do you need to actually do it?
Vivian didn’t just wake up one day knowing how to mount a bird or articulate a snake skeleton. Her skill in animal preservation is grounded in science and shaped by years of practice.
“I’m a biology major, so during my uni I did zoology. Then for my master’s, I specialised in skin studies. It was a huge part of what I studied,” she explains.
Armed with a strong scientific background, Vivian’s skill was then slowly honed through practice.
“Things started when I did a biodiversity study,” she says. “My supervisor was a museum curator, and we needed to preserve a lot of specimens.”
It was through that exposure that she began to understand what makes preservation tick, at both the scientific and curatorial level.
“So, of course, we needed to study a lot of the anatomic and chemical components of it,” she continues. “But we don’t group all of this under taxidermy—it falls under science and biology. The museum side is mainly taxidermy.”
So really, taxidermy is a combination of everything: biology, anatomy, chemistry, and hands-on museum work. This is what makes Vivian’s process so meticulous—and what makes her pieces so valuable.
4. How much can taxidermy be worth?
With all the science, time, and labour involved, it’s not surprising that taxidermy comes at a price. But what might surprise some is how much—and what actually determines the value.
“The rarity of the animal and the amount of time we spend are usually the two factors that affect our pricing,” Jivan explains.
That means a single piece can be worth thousands, not necessarily because it’s large or flashy, but because it’s rare, fragile, or difficult to work with.
“No, the size doesn’t really matter,” Vivian says. “We do have really, really rare specimens that are so small. Yeah. Some of them are so valuable that I don’t even sell them. And then we have really common snakes, super big ones that are so common that no one would think that it’s rare.”
One tiny specimen Vivian has is a diaphonised Brahminy blind snake. “It’s found in Singapore, but a lot of people don’t really see them because they are always under leaf litter and look like earthworms,” Vivian explains.
When I asked her how much she was selling it for, Vivian immediately shook her head. “I never put a price on it because I will never sell it. It’s priceless to me, a very, very special specimen. When I did field research in the past, this was one of the specimens that I looked for a lot, but could hardly ever find. This one was donated by the Herpetological Society of Singapore.”
5. Behind the price: labour, deadlines, and detail
One of Black Crow’s recent ambitious pieces was a skeletal preservation of a 3.5-metre python, displayed at the Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses exhibition at the ArtScience Museum from 15 Mar to 10 Aug 2025.
“We cleared off all the meat and then assembled it piece by piece,” Jivan says. “It was around 3 to 3.5m.”
Vivian recalls: “We rushed the entire project for them in 2 weeks. It was insane! We had all hands on deck.”
The final result—a delicate, ghostly structure of perfectly aligned vertebrae—was valued at $8,800, and currently ranks as Black Crow’s most valuable specimen.
Another show-stopping piece sits tucked in the corner of their studio: a grand peacock, made even more dramatic by Vivian’s styling. She extends its tail feathers using extras from other peacocks—think avian hair extensions, with each feather meticulously placed by hand. The result? A train longer and fuller than what nature gave it, and a final price tag of $7,000.
So when people ask, “Why does taxidermy cost so much?”, the answer is simple. Because it’s not just about preserving the animal. It’s as much science as it is art.
6. Why preserved animals don’t lose value
Unlike most consumer goods that lose value the moment you buy them, taxidermy doesn’t really depreciate. If anything, it often becomes more valuable over time, both financially and culturally.
“Depreciation’s highly unlikely,” Jivan says. “We keep it maintained. Occasionally, every year we do the maintenance work. So it’s hard to say there’s a depreciation value on it.”
In fact, some pieces may even appreciate.
“Appreciation could happen if the species becomes endangered,” he adds. “Which actually creates a problem for us, because then we need to figure out what to do.”
Black Crow works with pets and donated specimens, but never with any endangered or protected species. Doing so can be controversial—for example, a pair of taxidermied huia sold for over NZ$400,000 at a British auction in 2023, inciting calls for the New Zealand government to intervene in the sale of this extinct bird. Estimates pegged the selling price to be between £15,000 and £25,000, but it ultimately fetched £220,000 (S$377,620 or NZ$466,000). The species, native to New Zealand, was last spotted in 1907—no doubt a huge contributor to its heavy price tag.
But rarity isn’t just about the animal—it’s also about the technique.
7. What makes old taxidermy more valuable
Vivian tells me about clients who’ve brought in old specimens inherited from their great-grandparents. “When they brought it in, I looked at the technique and went, wow, this is from ages ago. This should be in a museum.”
That historical value comes from how the piece was made.
“Let’s say we have a hornbill that was run over by a car, and the beak is damaged,” Vivian says. “To restore it, we used to craft everything by hand. Maybe a few hundred years ago, they would use wood or even ivory to carve the same beak and put it on the specimen. After that, they used wood.”
With today’s technology, 3D printing is readily available for situations like that. But the convenience comes at a price: “It’s way faster, but then it isn’t as valuable or as unique as the one that’s carved out of ivory. So that is an instance of where the value of the specimen will be higher.”
For collectors and institutions who understand the craft, technique matters. Vivian explains that from a taxidermist’s point of view, a tiger that was preserved this year, compared to one preserved maybe 200 years ago, is going to show up with very different techniques and materials used. You can bet a tiger that old wouldn’t be stuffed with the modern-day foam or silicone used now.
“The techniques vary a lot, and old pieces can thus become very rare, antique museum pieces,” Vivian says. “For people who appreciate art and the amount of effort put into all of these, they would definitely place a higher value on older taxidermy.”
8. Taxidermy isn’t just luxury—it’s legacy
There’s no doubt that taxidermy is expensive. If you’re buying rare or exotic animals, you’re looking at 4- or even 5-figure sums. It’s often associated with trophy displays—mounted deer heads and animals frozen in place on grand estate walls.
“In Western countries, taxidermy items are items of luxury,” Jivan says. “Royals have it, rich people buy it for their houses. It’s considered a luxury item for the affluent.”
But that’s just one version of the story.
In Singapore, and across much of Asia, taxidermy isn’t always about prestige. It can be something quieter, and more profound.
I asked Vivian and Jivan how working in taxidermy has changed the way they think about death.
“In Western cultures, when someone dies, they throw a party, they celebrate the death,” Jivan reflects. “Here, not so much. Death is taboo in Asia. But when I got exposed to taxidermy, I found it more like accepting death and celebrating the life that the animal has lived.”
“By doing taxidermy, you preserve the memory of that pet versus keeping it in a pot of ash where you just forget after a few, few generations,” he adds. “I think it’s a different view of death.”
Vivian agrees, but from a more personal angle.
“For me, death is a journey. Don’t get scared when the time comes,” she says. “Personally, my grandma banned the word ‘death’ in the house because she’s so anxious about her time coming. Then we talked to her about this, she got more exposed, and is more accepting of what is going to come.”
“So she doesn’t view it as such a horrible, morbid thing, that she’s gonna die alone, that sort of thing. So it’s mainly like… the life’s journey, the memory of it. Instead of making it such a sad thing—it is to be celebrated, to be something more colourful.”
Everyone deals with grief differently. Everyone remembers differently. There’s no wrong way to say goodbye. Taxidermy just happens to be one of the most tactile, personal ways to do it.
9. Luxury, redefined
Taxidermy doesn’t fit the usual idea of luxury—and maybe that’s the point. It’s not about trends or exclusivity, but about your personal choice to remember something special to you in a lasting, physical way.
“Pet preservation is not a necessity,” Vivian says. After all, it doesn’t come cheap. Prices for pet preservation at Black Crow start from $300 for hamsters, $2,500 for small cats and dogs up to 5kg, and can go up $6,500 for large dogs over 30kg. For skeletal preservations, the prices double.
That said, can we really put a price on memory? “If you have extra money and you want to, it can help you preserve the memories of your pets,” Vivian says.
The emotional weight and sentimentality that goes behind that kind of decision create a different, more enduring kind of luxury. It’s personal, intentional, and often deeply comforting. It’s not about showing something off, but about keeping something close.
This article was first drafted with the help of AI and later reviewed and refined by the author.
This article is part of a series called Priced Possessions, where we chat with Singapore’s quirkiest collectors and put a price on their most prized possessions. Know a collector, or are one yourself? We’d love to connect. Email [email protected] to get in touch.
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About the author
Vanessa Nah likes her finance articles the way she likes her sitcoms—light-hearted, entertaining, and leaving people knowing a little more about life. She believes money—like life—should be made simple. Outside of work, you’ll find Vanessa attending dance classes, fingerpicking a guitar, and fulfilling her life mission to make her one-eyed cat the most spoiled kitty in the world.
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