A small plait of hair sits beneath the glass of a brooch. The person it belonged to has been dead for more than a century.
To us, it may seem unsettling to wear part of someone who has died. To the person who kept it, that may have been precisely the point: the hair was still theirs.
The Short Answer
People placed a dead loved one’s hair in rings, lockets and brooches because it made remembrance tangible. A portrait could show what someone looked like. A lock of hair was something that had actually been part of them.
Hair could be enclosed beneath glass, woven into a design or worked into a piece of jewellery. Such objects became especially visible in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America, where mourning jewellery formed part of a wider culture of personal keepsakes.
There is one qualification. Hair jewellery was not always about death. People also kept or exchanged the hair of living relatives, friends and sweethearts. The hair alone does not prove that its owner had died.
What We Know
Surviving jewellery gives us unusually direct evidence.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a heart-shaped locket containing a tightly woven plait of light brown hair beneath glass. On the reverse are an engraved skull and the death date of the person being remembered. In this case, the purpose is clear: it is a memorial.
Another brooch in the Met’s collection contains plaited hair beneath crystal, surrounded by pearls and jet. An inscription on its back records Charles T. Evans, who died at sea on 20 September 1852, aged 39. The hair, the name and the date work together to identify a particular loss.
The custom was older than Queen Victoria’s mourning for Prince Albert. The British Museum preserves mourning rings containing hair from earlier periods, including an example associated with a person who died in 1763. Victoria did not invent the practice, even though Victorian mourning culture later made such jewellery particularly familiar.
Hairwork was also a developed craft. An 1864 pattern book, published by manufacturing jewellers William Halford and Charles Young, offered designs for hair jewellery including brooches, rings, lockets, bracelets and other pieces. It is evidence that hairwork was being taught, designed and sold, not merely improvised within grieving households.
How It Became a Habit
Hair offered an unusual kind of keepsake.
It was personal, small enough to preserve and possible to incorporate into something worn close to the body. A lock might be kept simply. It might also be plaited beneath a locket’s glass or turned by a skilled maker into a more elaborate design.
By the nineteenth century, jewellers’ patterns and surviving objects show how varied the results could be. A discreet ring could hold a few strands. A brooch could display a woven panel. An inscription could make the object’s memorial purpose explicit.
In a period when mourning could shape clothing, social calls and jewellery, such a piece allowed remembrance to become part of daily dress. It could be seen by others or kept almost entirely private.
The Story Everyone Tells
The familiar account says that Victorian people were so fascinated by death that they routinely made jewellery from the hair of the deceased.
There is a real practice behind the story. Victorian mourning jewellery existed, and surviving pieces can be deeply personal.
But the account becomes misleading when it treats every hair bracelet or locket as a death relic, or credits the entire custom to Queen Victoria. Hair could mark affection while its owner was alive. Memorial examples also predate the Victorian period.
The Evidence Actually Says
The strongest evidence comes from objects whose inscriptions identify the deceased. A name, death date or memorial wording can establish what an individual piece was meant to do. Without that context, its meaning may be much less certain.
The Met describes hair jewellery as a tangible reminder of a loved one. Its collections include pieces clearly linked to mourning. The Smithsonian also notes that hair jewellery could be given as a sentimental token between living people.
That distinction matters. Hair was valued because it belonged to someone, not because that person necessarily had died.
So:
DOCUMENTED: Jewellery containing human hair was made, worn and sold.
DOCUMENTED: Some surviving pieces explicitly commemorate the dead through inscriptions, death dates and memorial symbols.
DOCUMENTED: Hair was also used in keepsakes connected with living loved ones.
WELL SUPPORTED: For mourners, keeping a dead person’s hair offered a physical, wearable connection to that individual.
UNSUPPORTED: Every old piece of hair jewellery must have been a mourning object, or the practice began with Queen Victoria.
Why It Stuck
A name can be engraved. A likeness can be painted. Hair offered something different.
It was a small, ordinary part of the person themselves. That made it possible to carry a memory into the years when the person could no longer be there.
Related Curiosities
Why Did People Cover Mirrors After a Death?
Why Do We Hold a Wake After Someone Dies?
Sources & Further Reading
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Heart-shaped mourning locket containing plaited hair, an engraved skull and a death date.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/16782
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Hairwork brooch commemorating Charles T. Evans, who died in 1852.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/16806
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Jewelry for America exhibition, on hair as a tangible reminder of a loved one in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/jewelry-for-america/exhibition-galleries
The British Museum — Mourning ring containing hair, associated with Robert Stirling, who died in 1763.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_AF-1712
Smithsonian Libraries — The jewellers’ book of patterns in hair work, published by William Halford and Charles Young in 1864.
https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/jewellersquotbo00will
Smithsonian Libraries — “Fashion for Hair”, on hairwork pattern books and hair jewellery exchanged as tokens of affection as well as mourning.
https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2014/06/25/fashion-for-hair-a-creepiness-i-like/