There’s something about “hair jewelry” that makes me cringe a little. Like “dusty ice cream” or “peanut butter and snails.” It just doesn’t seem right. But like many things in life, we have to look at the context, historically speaking.
Queen Victoria made hair jewelry popular by wearing a locket of her beloved Albert’s hair around her neck after he passed away.
The Victorian era ran with this morbid phenomenon and instead of just wearing a locket containing a snip of hair, began creating entire pieces of jewelry consisted of human hair…like, the whole piece (I’m not quite sure how they managed the clasp).
It could be a brooch, or a pendant with hair woven in the middle, or even a bracelet of hair. In its heyday, hair jewelry was considered both sentimental and fashionable. It caught on in Europe sometime before the 19th century, and then fell into vogue in the United States around the Civil War.
While we do custom design, we’ve yet to encounter any requests for hair jewelry. But you never know, right?
Victorian Hair Mourning Jewelry