Hair Receivers, Secret Beauty Aids of the Past

What a Victorian hair receiver was for

The hair receiver was a standard fixture on women’s dressing tables from Victorian times into the early decades of the 20th century, and some families used them as late as the 1950s. Its job was simple: it held the hair pulled from the brush and comb, which women used hard every day.

That saved hair was put to work. It could be stuffed into pincushions or small pillows. Hair was washed less often then than it is now, and women used oils to give it scent and shine. The leftover oil made combed hair an ideal pincushion filling, because it lubricated the pins and helped them slide through fabric. As pillow stuffing, hair was also less prickly than pinfeathers.

Hair receivers and the ratt

The most important use was probably the ratt, sometimes spelled rat. A ratt was a small ball of hair tucked into a hairstyle to give it volume and fullness. To make one, a woman stuffed a sheer hairnet with saved hair until it was about the size of a potato, then sewed it shut.

A favorite Victorian style parted the hair in the center and drew it out to the sides. In photographs from the period it is easy to tell the women with flat hair, who were not using ratts, from those with “big hair,” who were.

Ratts also solved a delicate problem. Wigs were common in the period, worn by women and by men (judges, magistrates and even soldiers in battle wore them), but they were usually made from someone else’s hair. A woman who built her style around a ratt could truthfully say that all of it was her own.

How common added hair had become shows in a piece of advice from Godey’s Lady’s Book: “When a lady is in danger of drowning, raise her by the dress and not by the hair, which oftentimes remains in the grasp.”

Why hairstyles mattered so much to Victorian women

The center-parted style showed as much of the face as possible. That preference had old roots. In the Renaissance a wide, high forehead was a sign of virtue, which is why paintings of the period so often show women with only a little hair around the face and a broad, bare brow.

Victorian women wore a little face powder and no other makeup, since anything more risked the label of “painted lady.” With cosmetics off limits, hairstyles and clothing carried most of the work of looking beautiful.

A woman’s hair was considered her crowning glory. In 1894 The Delineator magazine put it this way: “The often-admired ‘crowning glory’ may be rendered almost a disfigurement if disposed unbecomingly, while a tasteful and careful dressing of the tresses, even though they are not very beautiful, will lend a decided charm to a plain face.”

The dressing table that held the hair receiver usually carried a matching set: a tray, a powder box, a hatpin holder, brushes and a hand mirror. Many receivers were sold as part of these sets, which is why collectors often find them in the same pattern as a powder jar or pin tray.

How to identify an antique hair receiver

The giveaway is a finger-wide hole in the lid, through which the hair was poked. Without that hole, the same jar is usually a powder box. Receivers can be round or square, and some stand on small feet.

They were made in many materials, including glass and, later, celluloid, but some of the prettiest are porcelain. The German factory RS Prussia made especially attractive ones, and in 2002 one decorated with delicate floral prints sold on eBay for $152. At that time the finer antique receivers generally sold in the $100 range, and most brought well under that.

Porcelain receivers belong to the same family of dresser pieces as the hand-painted boxes and trays found in Limoges porcelain and Royal Bayreuth. Because decorated porcelain of this kind has been widely reproduced, it pays to know the signs of reproduction porcelain before buying.

Japanese potters made hair receivers too, though it is not known whether Japanese women saved their hair in the same way. Collectors can find Nippon, Kutani and Sumida examples.

Hair receivers and Victorian hair jewelry

Some writers say the hair saved in receivers also went into hair jewelry, love tokens and mourning keepsakes. Lori Verge, curator of the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, disagreed. Those pieces called for straight hair, she pointed out, not tangled combings, so she believed women used cut hair for them instead. Verge also noted that her own grandmother was still using a hair receiver in the 1950s.

Phrenology: reading the bumps on the head

Another reason Victorians wanted the head on display was phrenology, a popular “science” holding that a person’s qualities, good and bad, could be read from the shape of the skull. People called it “reading the bumps on your head.”

The idea was that each trait lived in a specific area of the brain. A strong trait made its area larger, which pushed out the skull and formed a bump. A trained phrenologist supposedly could judge your character by running his hands over your head, and many Victorians treated the reading as a forecast of the future, much like palm reading. One old photograph shows a phrenologist working on a sidewalk outside a store, his client seated in a barber-style chair.

For a time it was taken very seriously. Employers could require job applicants to get a reading to vouch for their honesty and diligence. Phrenologists worked as matchmakers and career counselors, and experts in education and criminology consulted them.

Practitioners worked from model heads or charts marking where each quality was found, and these diagrammed heads still turn up in antiques shops from time to time. The listed areas included language, parental love, fidelity, musical talent, valor, arithmetic, murder, mechanical skill, cunning, larceny, pride, wit, ambition, poetic ability, compassion, belief in God, memory and perseverance.

Phrenology was not entirely wrong in principle. Certain parts of the brain do control specific functions, which is why a stroke can take away speech or muscle control, and brain areas that are used more do grow. Its map of traits, though, was badly flawed. Every quality it placed was in the wrong spot except one, and later charts moved that one to the wrong area too. It never became an accepted science and has all but disappeared, while the hair receivers from the same dressing tables remain very collectible.