What a sweet little vanity jar I thought as I saw the squat white container adorned with pink roses and trimmed in yellow and lime green. It looked like one of those Nippon trinket boxes that held earrings or small jewelry on a woman’s dressing table way back when.
Delicate little items like this turn up at auction often, but unfortunately no one buys or uses them anymore. The days of women sitting in front of a mirror at a vanity topped with face powders, combs and brushes are long gone. Nevertheless, I like these relics not because of their heritage but because they are pretty.
As I handled the jar, I found a paper tag with a description and price on it, ostensibly left by a dealer who had tried to sell it:
Handpainted Nippon hair receiver
Decorated with roses and forget-me-nots
$35
I’d never heard of a hair receiver, so I Googled. These little dresser jars were popular during the Victorian period when women didn’t wear much makeup except for a little face powder, but made up for it by wearing their hair big. A woman’s hair was – and still is – her crown.
The receiver stored hair from their combs and brushes. These days we just throw the stuff in the garbage pail in our bathrooms. As for me, the hair from my natural locks just drops into the sink as little ringlets, but there’s never enough to put into a hair receiver.
I’m sure I’ve seen hair receivers at auction before but never realized what they were. I have come across other items pertaining to a woman’s hair. Once, I picked up a tiny paper box that I assumed had once held jewelry. Another auction-goer told me that I was correct, but the jewelry was made of human hair. In this case, it must have been a ring or earrings.
Receiver hair would have been much too tangled for jewelry. Straight hair was used for that purpose.
Hair receivers were prevalent from the 19th-century Victorian era into the 20th century. Several articles on the web described them as a fixture on Victorian dressing tables. Were they? They seemed such a luxury that I suspect they were used mostly by women of high means and middle means because most folks likely could not afford them.
I was curious about their popularity among African American women. On the web, I found photos of middle-class black women with the common hairstyle of the period as well as natural styles. These portraits of African Americans in Tallahassee, FL, are in the Alvan S. Harper Collection at the State Library and Archives of Florida.
As for the hair receivers, some of the loveliest of them were fashioned from porcelain like the Japanese-made Nippon jar at this auction. Here’s one made of celluloid in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It dates to 1883-1910.
I now know that I can identify them by the finger-size hole in the center of the lid. They usually were part of a set with a matching powder box, and often shared the dressing table with a brush and comb, hand mirror, button hook for tying boot and shoe horn.
The hair stored in hair receivers was used to create a ratt, which was a small ball of hair stuffed inside a hairnet and sewed shut. It was used to bulk up a hairstyle to make it appear bigger. In some cases, women were mimicking the piled-high styles of the Gibson Girls, a fake ideal woman created as pen-and-ink drawings by Charles Dana Gibson.
The hair was also used in pincushions and small pillows, which, one contemporary writer noted, could be sent to a best friend, husband or lover.
Hair receivers were made out of more than just hard materials. In a 1916 school sewing book, girls were encouraged to sew their own cloth hair receiver using a handkerchief or linen fabric. “There is nothing more unsightly than a comb filled with hair or bunches of hair lying about,” the book stated – seemingly shaming the girls – as it offered instructions on creating the receivers. In 1889, Butterick published a sewing book that included decorative fabric hair receivers.
If not for hair, these little dresser jars could now be re-purposed as holders for potpourri, small jewelry, coins, or anything else you can imagine.
