Victorian Hair Art

This is a clip from the second season of Science Channel's Oddities, and it concerns something I love: Victorian mourning.

Also, if you read my last post, you'd notice that the name "Victoriana Lady" sounds extremely familiar. Yes, that's the person I'm modeling for, and whose collection I'm incredibly envious of.

There are plenty of aspects to Victorian mourning - the superstitions, the clothing, the rules of etiquette (such as how long people are expected to mourn), post-mortem photos (which I am incredibly interested in) -, and I'm fascinated with all of them, but what I will talk about today is hair art.

Now, you've probably learned quite a bit about it from the video, but I'm going to talk about it anyway.

It was a common practice to take the hair of a deceased loved one and to keep it, incorporating it into sculptures, pictures, and jewelry. I've seen lockets with woven hair inside, watch fobs made from braided hair, bracelets, brooches, and the like.

A brooch made from human hair.

Hair isn't necessarily the easiest medium to work with. Braiding it and weaving it as intricately and precise as the Victorians did is a painstaking project, a labor of love requiring skill and perseverance. Sculptures like the one in the video must have been extraordinarily difficult to make, but are, in my opinion, well worth the effort. Hair never decays; the art will never perish, and the people it was made from are effectively immortalized through it.

A Victorian hair sculpture.

A brooch incorporating human hair, which is fashioned into the shape of a feather.