The Hair Receiver, what is this antique jar with a hole in the lid?!

Have you come across one of these?

A small porcelain jar from somebody's dresser, possible flowers painted on the lid and a very odd round hole in the middle of it. You may have come across one of these: I often watch as people pick it up and turn it over, and then they put it back, because the hole makes no sense There is one of these at nearly every estate sale. A small porcelain jar from somebody's dresser, possible flowers painted on the lid and a very odd round hole in the middle of it.

You may have stumbled upon one at an antique store or estate sale: I often watch as people pick it up and turn it over, and then they put it back, because the hole makes no sense -- and what would they even use it for?! -- and what would they even use it for?! 

What it was for

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History defines the one within their collection in one sentence: a small vessel designed to hold hair that accumulated on a comb or brush.

From the later nineteenth century into the 1920s, a woman cleaning her brush at the end of the day pushed the combings through the hole instead of into the fire. The jar sat on the dressing table, usually with a matching powder jar and a pin tray, in porcelain or pressed glass, and later in celluloid.

Saving hair sounds odd, but it served an absolute essential purpose. The piled hairstyles in every photograph from those years did not stand up on their own, and they weren't wigs - they were women's hair built over pads called a rat. These stuffed rolls a few inches in width, were pinned near the scalp with the styled hair swept up and over it. These collection jars full of their own hair served as a way to essentially provide women with extensions, without having to go through the process of finding their exact color and texture. Whatever the 'rats' did not use were also then reused into pincushions, as human hair being softer than feathers and already free. 

But, no - not hairwork. 

Many people believe, naturally, that these recievers were meant to collect and feed the Victorian hairwork trade - all those watch chains and brooches woven from human hair.

However, the hair within these collection jars would actually not be as helpful as you'd think. Hairwork wanted long, unbroken strands, and combings tend to be short and tangled and full of snapped ends.

Why they disappeared

The bob killed it. When hair went short in the 1920s there were no combings worth keeping and no pompadour left to pad, and the jar stopped taking its place on the dresser. Victoria Sherrow's Encyclopedia of Hair ties the decline to the shorter styles. 

If you find one

You may very well likely come across one of these items if you frequent antique stores and estate sales. There are porcelain ones, pressed glass versions and celluloid recievers from boxed vanity sets. Check the lid before you pay: the matching powder jar is the same shape without the hole, and after a century, lids tend to stray between sets.

If there is still hair inside, you are holding somebody's hundred year old vanity combings. Which may be either the reason to buy it or the reason to set it down, depending on who you are. (We'd be snatching that up ourselves.) 

We will catalogue one when a good one comes through, card and all. The signup at the foot of the page is how you hear about it first.

Sources

• Hair receiver, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
• Mary Miley Theobald, Revisited Myth 94, History Myths Debunked, 2016
• Mark Campbell, Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work, 1867, reprinted as The Art of Hair Work, 1875
• Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, Greenwood Press, 2006
• Hair receiver, Wikipedia