The Autograph Alternative: Human Hair
Collectors are bidding up the bounty on keepsake locks of the deceased and famous
Collector Luis Mushro says that the market for historical hair has grown since his first sale more than a decade ago. Then, there were about 150 serious collectors, he says. Now, he counts around 2,000 worldwide. He has several auctions currently on eBay, from British kings and queens and American presidents to the Red Baron, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh. Mushro says he's only recently run out of follicles from Charles Dickens.
There is no industry standard for length. Collectors sell it by the inch or a fraction thereof. Sometimes it comes in 1/8-inch lengths, says Mushro, sometimes half that length.
"There isn't that much famous hair out there, so the market changes," he says. Historic hair, compared with, say, an autograph, comes cheap. A document signed by Lincoln, for example, costs $50,000 on historyforsale.com.
But it is historic hair that frequently makes news. Last month, a company created a synthetic diamond from carbon taken from Beethoven's hair and sold it for $1 million. It is reported that the composer was nearly bald near the end of his life as friends and visitors would help themselves to some of the dying man's hair. In 2001, researchers documented a variety of forensic tests conducted on strands of his hair and determined that he died from lead poisoning. The hair came from a collection of hair purchased at Sotheby's auction house.
As advances in DNA technology continue, collectors say, interest in their collections of historical human hair will only deepen.
"Just look at those mummies that they pulled out of glaciers after thousands of years—it's almost perfectly preserved," says Reznikoff. It was also a common Victorian fad to save tears in small glass vials sealed with a cork. Inevitably, though, the seal would not hold and the tears would evaporate. The little bottles, however, are now worth considerable sums to collectors.
"The great thing about hair," says Mushro, "is that it just doesn't degrade over time."
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