What the August 2016 Archives Reveal About Vintage Hair Accessories

One of the most searched-for terms in our August 2016 archives is “Edwardian tortoiseshell side combs” – and for good reason. That month, a reader donated a small collection of original side combs from a Cotswolds estate sale, each piece bearing the unmistakable warm amber tones and fine-toothed construction that hallmarks hand-finished tortoiseshell work from the 1900s. We spent the better part of three weeks documenting these pieces, learning that the slight colour variation between the top and bottom combs wasn’t a flaw but a testament to the natural material’s response to heat and pressure during moulding.

The August 2016 archives are particularly dear to us because they captured a turning point in how British collectors approached hair accessories. Before that summer, many enthusiasts focused almost exclusively on the flashier Art Deco pieces – geometric bakelite slides and chromium-plated barrettes. But the posts from August 2016 shifted attention toward quieter, more tactile objects: velvet-covered hairbands for late-summer garden parties, hand-carved wooden hairpins from the Lake District, and the delicate celluloid combs that were marketed as “washable” novelties in the 1920s.

A Month of Practical Discovery

What made the August 2016 entries stand out was their unapologetic practicality. Instead of merely celebrating the beauty of each accessory, we dedicated entire posts to the nitty-gritty of preservation. One popular article walked readers through the safe removal of verdigris from silver hair slides without damaging the underlying metal. Another shared a step-by-step method for re-stitching a velvet bow’s frayed edges to its metal clip base – a repair that can extend the life of an Edwardian hair ornament by decades if done correctly.

The archive also contains the first detailed guide we ever wrote about identifying original French jet vs. black glass in hair ornaments. That guide, born from a reader’s question about a mourning locket that turned out to be a hair comb, remains one of the most referenced resources on the blog. It was in August 2016 that we first emphasised the importance of checking for air bubbles and mould seams – two tell-tale signs that separate the two materials.

Three August 2016 Posts Worth Revisiting

• “The Garden Party Velvet Band” – This post examined five velvet hairbands from 1910–1925, comparing the difference between silk velvet and cotton velvet in terms of fading and pile retention. It also included a simple technique for re-stiffening a floppy band using archival-quality card and a bias-tape cover.
• “Celluloid and Its Imitators” – A deep dive into the early synthetic that dominated affordable hair accessories in the 1910s and 1920s. The article addressed the common misconception that all celluloid smells like camphor (it does not after the first few decades), and discussed safe storage away from heat and humidity.
• “Portobello Road Finds – Saturday, 6th August 2016” – A real-time account of a morning spent at the famous market, where the author unearthed a set of four matching celluloid hair slides with a rare butterfly motif. The post included negotiating tips (never ask for a price while the seller is still setting up) and a warning against buying resin pieces mislabelled as vintage.

These three posts, though written years ago, still receive steady traffic each August. Readers often comment that the velvet band guide helped them identify a piece their grandmother wore at a summer wedding, or that the Portobello tips saved them from overpaying for a common 1980s plastic slide dressed up as interwar celluloid.

Techniques That Emerged from That Month

August 2016 was also the month we developed a reproducible method for testing metal content in hair accessories without damaging the piece. The technique involved applying a tiny drop of dilute nitric acid to a hidden inner surface of a clip or slide – a method used by museum conservators. We shared it with a clear warning about safety (gloves, ventilation) and included a colour chart so readers could match the reaction to the metal: bright green for copper, cream for silver, no change for stainless steel. That chart has since been copied across many online forums, often without credit, which we take as a sign of its utility.

The archives from that month also introduced a classification system for hair combs: prong count, curvature radius, and temper of the teeth. This system, which we later expanded and refined, grew out of a reader’s request to distinguish a Victorian back comb from a 1930s dressmaker’s comb. The August 2016 version was simpler – just three categories – but it laid the groundwork for everything that followed.

Why the August 2016 Archives Matter Now

For collectors who joined the community after 2017, the August 2016 posts offer a snapshot of a fledgling field before it became crowded with reproduction pieces and marketing hype. The photos in those entries are unpolished – taken with a mid-range digital camera on a windowsill – yet they capture the honest texture of old materials. You can see the slight warp of a century-old celluloid slide, the hand-painted veins on a faux-tortoiseshell comb, the uneven stitching on a Liberty-print band. These imperfections are exactly what define authentic vintage, and the archives preserve them without the polishing filters that later became common.

We have often been asked to re-shoot those original images with proper lighting and a neutral background. We have chosen not to, because the raw quality of the August 2016 archives tells a story about how this blog – and the broader community of conscious collectors – began: not as a commercial venture, but as a shared notebook of discoveries, mistakes, and genuine curiosity.

If you are new to the world of vintage hair accessories and want to understand how the field evolved, spending an afternoon with the August 2016 posts is a better introduction than any streamlined guide. You will see us learning to distinguish bakelite from catalin, misidentify a 1950s plastic clip as 1920s, and celebrate a simple £2 find as if it were a museum piece. That honest enthusiasm is the thread that still runs through everything we do.

Should you wish to compare how the blog matured in the following year, the May 2017 archives demonstrate a shift toward more technical content and a more structured approach to cataloguing – a direct result of lessons learned during that August 2016 burst of activity. The progression from a simple list of finds to a systematic record of measurements, materials, and provenance is captured best by comparing those two months side by side.

One final detail that August 2016 taught us: always store side combs with their teeth pointing upward in a lined box, never flat in a drawer. The pressure of stacking – even lightweight plastic – can slowly bend the prongs inward, making the comb slip out of the hair. We learned this the hard way after a customer sent us a 1900s tortoiseshell comb she had kept in a jewellery case for thirty years; the teeth had taken a permanent curve. That comb is now part of our reference collection, and its photograph appears in every preservation talk we give.