The Unsettling Reason Victorians Used Human Hair To Make Creepy Trinkets

We’re in Victorian Britain, and across the country people are being swept up by a weird and sinister craze. Everywhere you look, locals are adorning themselves with unusual jewelry. The intricate pieces might seem perfectly normal at first, but look a little closer, and you’ll soon realize that things aren’t quite as they seem. It turns out that these creepy adornments are actually symbolic of a dark fixation that’s gripping society. But what’s so strange about these particular items? Well, they’re made out of human hair!

And it’s not just jewelry that the Victorians made out of hair – even though that’s strange enough. They also used the “material” to make wreaths and other decorative pieces for their homes. Some people, in fact, actually pulverized it to create a pigment they could use for painting!

This creepy trend had been around for a long time, but it really blew up after Queen Victoria herself took to it. She was, after all, about as famous as you could possibly be in the 19th century. And when the monarch started wearing a hair necklace, many of her subjects across Britain soon followed suit.

But this wasn’t merely a British craze, as people in America also began to use hair in this weird way. Strangely, the trend really seemed to gain traction here as the United States descended into one of its darkest ever periods. The American Civil War kicked off in 1861, and during this time hair art became really popular.

Increasing numbers of women began creating artworks out of human hair across the United States. It was such a popular thing to do, in fact, that you could even pick up tips about it in popular magazines! Despite how disturbing it might seem, the trend had become a mainstream phenomenon.

Naturally, it might seem really creepy looking back at this bizarre behavior from a 21st-century perspective. The idea of clumps of hair separated from a person’s head could you make you feel a little squeamish! Yet hundreds of years ago, people seemed to be perfectly okay with it. But why?

Hair art apparently traces back to the 17th century, according to Artsy. From there it persevered and apparently grew in popularity, and by the mid-19th century it was a widespread phenomenon. As writer Wilkie Collins wrote in 1854, bracelets created out of people’s hair had become “in England one of the commonest ornaments of woman’s wear.”

We also see hair jewelry mentioned by perhaps the most famous writer of the Victorian era. Writing in 1865’s Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens depicts a man who carries a “decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck.” By “hair-guard,” the acclaimed novelist was talking about a chain for a pocket watch that was made out of hair.

The practice of making such hair art pieces was usually left to the women of Victorian society. And it seems to have had quite a mainstream appeal, as ladies could pick up tips about it in books and magazines concerned with other popular crafts. Artsy notes that women could learn how to make hair art alongside other crafts such as sewing.

There were, of course, many different ways to approach the intricate craft of hair art. According to Artsy, one approach was “palette work.” This involved spreading hair across a flat surface and then entwining and cutting it into specific shapes and arrangements. This was apparently a good method if you wanted to make jewelry and bigger pieces.

Emily Snedden Yates is a special projects manager at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians. And she explained to Atlas Obscura that this flattened hair would often be slipped underneath a sheet of glass. Alternatively, it might also have been placed over a piece of ivory, which meant it could then be worn as jewelry.

Snedden Yates mentioned an exhibition she helped to curate that contained examples of palette work. The expert said in 2018, “We have a few pieces in the show where there’s palette work on the inside with the person’s hair, that is close to the heart, that is facing the person wearing the piece of jewelry...”

Apparently, another popular method of creating hair art was the so-called gimp work technique. Snedden Yates explained, “You would take individual strands of hair and make them into loops around wire, and then you would do these tiny loops on the wire over and over and over again.” After repeated looping, you’d end up with a significant thread of hair that could then be shaped.

Table work, meanwhile, involved laying hair out on a stool-like table that had a somewhat rounded top. Then, using lead, wire or wood, the hair would need to be weighed down. It could then be braided and shaped into a huge variety of designs.

Thanks to the table work technique, a person could manipulate hair into shapes likes hearts, leaves and anchors. These things could then be worn as adornments such as earrings, necklaces or brooches. In many cases, the items were incredibly intricate and complex in the way that they’d been designed.

Yet another technique was something called dissolved hair work, which Atlas Obscura notes was especially common throughout the 1900s. This involved grinding hair down until it formed a sort of dye. This was then combined with a tree gum – forming a sticky substance that was used as a sort of paint for ivory surfaces.

Just looking at the various methods of creating hair art, we can see that it was a remarkably intricate craft. But in spite of this, it wasn’t just professional artisans who took up the art. Certainly, some jewelers made a business out of the craft, while amateurs would also weave hair inside their own households.

Those who dabbled in hair art also tended to occupy a very particular place in society. Snedden Yates told Atlas Obscura that “the people making it were wealthy, generally middle-class, white, women, Christians, so you’re going to see the iconography that affects their lives.” So, the practice certainly wasn’t for everyone.

Having said that, hair art really did become increasingly widespread during the 19th century. This is perhaps best exemplified by a book published in 1867 titled Self-Instruction in the Art of Hair Work, Dressing Hair, Making Curls, Switches, Braids and Hair Jewelry of Every Description. Written by Mark Campbell, this work really got into the finer details of hair art.

Many people of the Victorian era, then, had become swept up by the craze. And thanks to books like Campbell’s, it was pretty accessible to learn. But that begs the question as to why people were so interested in it in the first place. For what possible reason had they turned to such a weird art form?

Well, the answer isn’t terribly cheery. Basically, hair art was largely associated with death – often created to serve as a memento mori. This Latin term translates to “remember you must die,” and the artworks themselves were meant to highlight a person’s mortality and the shortness of life. Towards the end of the 19th century, then, hair art had come to be created as a way to honor the dead.

The rate of infant mortality was particularly high as hair art was becoming popular during the 17th and 18th centuries. Given that stark reality, the notion of death occupied a huge place in society. So, hair art can be seen as a reaction to this state of affairs, which really peaked during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Victoria became the British monarch in 1837 and ruled until she passed away in 1901. But four decades before her own death, she lost her spouse Prince Albert. In the wake of that, she started to wear jewelry that had been made with locks of his hair. No less than eight such adornments were done with the prince’s locks, according to Atlas Obscura.

As the mind behind the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York City, it’s fair to say that Joanna Ebenstein is an expert on the macabre. Speaking to Artsy in 2018, she described Queen Victoria’s contribution to the world of hair art. The expert said, “In 1861 her beloved husband Prince Consort Albert died, upon which the Queen entered into a state of formal mourning that lasted the rest of her life. This encouraged a fashion for mourning in popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic that lingered until the turn of the 20th century.”

Though the reason for hair art’s increasing popularity was arguably quite different across the Atlantic. The United States descended into civil war at around the same time that Queen Victoria had started wearing hair jewelry to mourn her husband. The huge number of losses experienced by Americans, then, meant that there was an increased need to commemorate the dead.

For most of us today, taking locks of hair from deceased relatives can seem like a pretty dark thing to do. But things were very different in the 19th century. Death occupied a much more central part of the culture, and funerals were generally affairs that took place inside households.

Dr. Helen Sheumaker has written on the subject of hair art in her book Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hair Work. And she told National Geographic, “Not only were people used to being around bodies that were dying and had recently died, but the kind of associations that we have today of the dead body being a gruesome thing or a frightening thing was a little different.” So, tufts of hair taken from the remains of a relative wouldn’t have been seen as particularly unsettling.

More than that, as Sheumaker has argued, hair art wasn’t quite about the notion of death itself. Rather, it was more about remembering the life of somebody who’d been lost. The expert explained, “It’s about sentiment and emotion and showing other people how you’re related to others.”

Karen Bachmann teaches Victorian hair art at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York City. And she reflected on the subject to National Geographic – pointing out that hair’s resistance to decay makes it perfect for remembering the dead. After all, it’s “a very personal indicator of self.”

Objects made out of a deceased person’s hair are direct reminders of that individual. And in some way, they might even suggest to grieving family members that the person still endures in some form. These mementos were reflections on life and death – allowing mourning people to reflect on and deal with their loss.

But as Snedden Yates explained to Artsy, hair art wasn’t exclusively created in order to memorialize the dead. This was definitely a huge part of it, but often it was made as an expression of friendship or family. For example, hair could be formed into the shape of a family tree.

People also used to make wreaths out of hair which could then be placed around family portraits. Additionally, as Yates pointed out, “A lot of hair would be braided and then placed in a book and a poem would be written underneath it, or something describing their relationship with a person. It was really an ode to the person’s essence.”

Other uses of hair art in the 19th century are quite similar to practices that still exist today, too. It was known for women to give each other hair jewelry, for example, as people might exchange friendship bracelets in the present. Mothers would also sometimes frame a lock of their child’s hair from the first time they got it cut, which sometimes still happens.

Having said that, hair art definitely decreased in popularity after the Victorian era came to an end. A number of reasons have been offered to account for this change – such as the advent of funeral homes. Plus, ideas related to hygiene developed around that time and general fashion trends naturally evolved.

Changes in the tastes of household decor also meant that hair art was no longer widespread, Bachmann told National Geographic. The 20th century saw people’s houses increasingly finished with plastered walls painted in uniform colors. This marked a change from the Victorian era’s preference for patterned wallpaper, which lent itself more to hair art.

Women’s clothing also transformed as the 20th century wore on – meaning that hair jewelry no longer fit in. Sheumaker explained to National Geographic, “Not only are fashions changing in terms of how people are decorating their bodies and their houses, but the fashion of sanitary hygienic practices is rapidly shifting people away from kind of Victorian models of heavy, ornate, multiple layers of things, [and] not washing things because that hurts the fabric.”

Snedden Yates, meanwhile, argued that WWI marked the ultimate move away from hair art. She told Atlas Obscura, “People were expected to donate as much money as possible to the war... I think that really just put a stop to all the sentimentality and the over-the-top mourning and rituals.”

Hair art never recovered as a mainstream practice after the conflict, but it didn’t die out completely. In fact, there was even a magazine called Rookie that published tips for creating a hair bracelet not too long ago. And you can scour the internet in search of pieces to buy for yourself.

In more recent decades, hair art has even been created with a fresh, explicitly political message behind it. And Sheumaker elaborated on this idea during her interview with National Geographic. She explained, “In the 1980s and ’90s there were feminist artists who used women’s hair to make statements about women’s position in society.”

There have also been examples of hair art created to further the cause of racial justice. Some African-Americans use the practice as a means to highlight the black experience, for instance. All in all, then, hair art can still hold a great deal of significance for people, even if its meaning has changed along with the political and historical context of society.