CC BY 4.0, The post When grief was gem-set: the eerie Victorian brooches made of hair, teeth, and tears appeared first on Boing Boing.

As a result, 'mourning portraits' became a popular custom amongst 19th century society. A mother and daughter are pictured left in mourning dress in the Ballarat area of Victoria, Australia in a ...

Victorian Mourning Jewelry, containing a lock of hair from the deceased Source: Thayne Tuason [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons There were rules of what men and women should wear in each ...

Victorian life was suffused with death. Epidemics such as diphtheria, typhus and cholera scarred the country, and from 1861 the bereaved Queen made mourning fashionable.

Source: Carl Rudolph Sohn (1845-1908) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons The Victorian society of the late 1800s was obsessed with death. Queen Victoria set the tone for this after the death ...