hair

[dragonlady7]

tehta had a post a while ago about hair color, I believe-- did you? Some question about it...
Z was having a discussion today about hair (I don't know what about it) and IMd me and asked me if I had any pictures of my grandmother's Victorian hair wreath. And I remembered: oh yes! She has this thing, this bizarre thing: some ancestor's maiden sister made a particularly elaborate hair wreath, and it was passed down to Grandma because she is noted in the extended family as being a collector of old things.

It is made entirely of human hair, although I believe there is some wire and some thread to keep it in shape. It's about eighteen inches in diameter, I think, and is mounted in a deep glass frame. Grandma keeps it on her living room wall. I can't remember any of the details, but I believe it was made some time late in the nineteenth century-- Victorians were into that kind of crap.

And it's fascinating, because none of the hair is apparently dyed. I don't know how many individuals donated hair to its construction, but there are enough different colors that it has to have been several. I do wonder what color its creator's hair was. None of the hair is gray either. I'd say it's pretty certain that all the hair is from white people, too.

But there are so many different shades. An ashy blonde, a platinum blonde, a honey blonde; an auburn, a chestnut, a sandy brown, a dark red-brown... All weirdly stitched into flower shapes, but you know those Victorian maiden aunts and their fucking weird hobbies...

Comments

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. I don't know quite when the fad was, though?

There was also a related tradition of making mementos with the hair of the deceased...

[(Anonymous)]

The hair might have been bought from a hairdresser or something. People used to sell their hair for wigs, as many tragic novels point out.

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Was me. But I bet my IP address made that clear.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

LOL. I haven't started keeping people's IPs on Post-its yet.

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I meant that if you looked mine up on whois it'd probably show my place of employment, which would let you guess it was me with a fair degree of accuracy...

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I don't recall whether Grandma said anything about that or not. I have the impression she said that wasn't the case, but then, I don't remember.

what we were talking about

[(Anonymous)]

For some reason Jamie told Laura you could make beaucoup bucks by selling your hair on eBay. (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=9505258449) I cannot explain how or why this came up in conversation; I can only hope that she was talking about her sister Jamie and not our boss Jamie [though it saddens me that nothing can be ruled out].

Au contraire, there is plenty of gray hair in the wreath. Pure white or gray hair is not a natural color. Naturally gray hair is still very slightly blonde; pure white or gray hair is usually the product of a blue rinse. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_rinse)

- Z