It looks like a pretty little jar that lost its purpose.
A porcelain pot. A lid. And right in the middle of that lid — a finger-sized hole. Too big for perfume. Wrong shape for an inkwell. Not a sugar bowl. Not a jewelry box with a normal opening.
So what was it for?
It is a hair receiver — a standard dressing-table accessory in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Women brushed their hair and pulled the loose strands from the comb or brush. Those strands were not always thrown away. They were pushed through the hole in the lid and saved inside the pot.
Why keep hair? Fashion and thrift. Collected hair was often shaped into small pads nicknamed “rats” (or “ratts”) and tucked under a hairstyle to add height and fullness — the big, filled-out looks that were stylish at the time. Some hair was also used in hairwork jewelry, or as soft stuffing for tiny pincushions and small cushions, because human hair was finer than many other fillers available then.
Hair receivers were commonly made of porcelain, glass, metal, or celluloid. Many came as part of a matching dressing-table set with a powder jar or trinket box. Shapes were usually round or oval; the hole was the giveaway feature that confuses people today.
Museum and history sources describe the same routine: save brushed-out hair, reuse it for styling and craft work, and keep the receiver beside the brush and mirror. The habit faded as shorter hairstyles became fashionable in the early twentieth century and the need for saved hair declined.
Today the little pot with a hole in the lid looks mysterious — until you know it was a recycling bin for the hairbrush, not a broken container.
What other “pretty mystery jar” should we decode next? Tell us in the comments.
Once you know the name, the design clicks: the hole is not a defect. It is the feature that let a dressing table stay tidy while saving material that fashion demanded.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_receiver
- https://www.historicprincewilliam.org/county-history/stories/hair-jewelry-and-hair-receivers.html
Image credit: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Randolph.hollingsworth). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hair_receiver.jpg
