July 6th, 2015: Hair Bracelet

[xoxoxoBruce]

This bracelet worn by Charlotte Bronte, woven from the hair of her two sisters, Anne and Emily.
Of course all three sisters were famous in literary circles and the bane of high school students.

Part of the body yet easy to separate from it, hair retained its luster long after the rest of the person decayed.
Portable, with a shine like certain gems or metals, hair moved easily from being an ornamental feature of the
body to being an ornament worn by others.

By the 1840s, hair jewelry had become so fashionable that advertisements for hair artisans, designers, and
hairworkers ran in newspapers, and magazines printed a sea of articles on the minute particulars of the fad.
The London jeweler Antoni Forrer, a well-known professional hairworker in the 1840s, had fifty workers fully
employed at his Regent Street store.

At the Great Exhibition, around eleven displays of the art garnered glowing reviews, including pictures
embroidered in hair of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, and the Hamburgh Exchange.
A tall vase “composed entirely of human hair” and a “horn filled with artificial flowers in human hair,
representing the horn of plenty,” were other impressive exhibits.

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