Vintage Hair Accessories by Decade

Open your grandmother's jewelry box. 💎 Somewhere between the brooches and the pearls, there's a tortoiseshell hairpin, a glittering Art Deco comb or a little leather barrette with a wooden stick.

Each one tells you exactly when it was worn. Because vintage hair accessories changed with every decade, just like hemlines and music. 🎶

In this guide, we travel through the 20th century, from 1900 to 1999. You'll see how women held their hair up, which vintage hairpins and hair sticks they wore, what they were made of and how to get each look today. ✨

What's inside this vintage hair accessories guide 👇

  • 🎩 The 1900s: Gibson Girl pompadours and tortoiseshell pins
  • 📌 The 1910s: the great hatpin panic
  • ✨ The 1920s: flappers, bobby pins and Art Deco combs
  • 💎 The 1930s: jeweled combs and new plastics
  • 🎖️ The 1940s: victory rolls and the wartime hairpin shortage
  • 🎀 The 1950s: the French twist
  • 🐝 The 1960s: the beehive
  • 🌼 The 1970s: boho hair and leather stick barrettes
  • 💥 The 1980s: scrunchies and the first claw clips
  • 🥢 The 1990s: the decade hair sticks went mainstream

Hair Stick, Hairpin or Hatpin? A Quick Word First 🧷

Before we start, a little honesty. The words changed over time. "Hair stick" is mostly a modern term. Early 20th-century sources talk about ornamental hairpins, back combs and hatpins.

  • 🥢 Hair stick: one long, straight pin that holds a bun. The modern name.
  • 📍 Hairpin: a U-shaped or straight pin, plain or decorated. The old everyday word.
  • 🪮 Back comb: a decorative comb pushed into a bun or pompadour.
  • 🎩 Hatpin: a long pin that went through the hat and the hair to keep a big hat in place.

So when we talk about vintage hair sticks, we mean all the long decorative pins that did the same job. The idea is ancient. You can read about its roots in our guide to the history of hair sticks across cultures. 🌏

1900s: Gibson Girl Pompadours and Tortoiseshell Hairpins 🎩

The 1900s were all about volume. The famous Gibson Girl hairstyle was a high, rounded pompadour, often built over a pad of hair called a "rat". Big hair needed a lot of help. 💪

What held it up? Plenty of Edwardian hairpins, in many sizes and materials:

  • 🐢 Tortoiseshell, the luxury choice
  • 🦴 Horn, bone and amber
  • 🪮 Large ornamental back combs, set with colored stones, baroque pearls or gold filigree
  • 🎩 Hatpins, to anchor the enormous hats of the day

Museums still hold beautiful examples. The RISD Museum has an early 1900s American tortoiseshell hairpin about 6 inches long. That's the same length as many hair sticks today! 📏

Art Nouveau Hair Jewelry 🦋

At the luxury end, French jeweler René Lalique turned hair combs into art. The V&A Museum holds his tiara comb from 1903–04, made of horn, glass, enameled gold and fire opals. Lalique is credited with bringing horn into fine jewelry, shaping it into flowers, waves and butterflies.

The Rise of Celluloid 🧪

Real tortoiseshell was expensive. Enter celluloid, one of the first plastics. The name dates from 1872, and it was soon used to imitate ivory and tortoiseshell, according to Wikipedia. Suddenly, a faux tortoiseshell comb was within reach of almost everyone. 🙌

Hairpins by the Millions 🏭

Plain hairpins became an industry too. In 1903, Solomon H. Goldberg founded the Hump Hair Pin Mfg. Co. in Chicago. According to the Made in Chicago Museum, his machine made 125 hairpins per minute, or 180,000 a day. That's a lot of hairpins for big hair. 😮

🇨🇭 The European cousin of the hair stick: in Switzerland, folk-costume Sunday hairpins were worn straight through a braid. By around 1900, some reached over 35 cm (about 14 inches), according to the V&A.

1910s: The Hatpin Panic and the First Bobs 📌

The 1910s had a sharp problem. Literally. 😅 Hats were huge, so hatpins were long. Typical ones measured 6 to 8 inches, and some reached 10 or even 12 inches.

Those long points could hurt people on crowded streetcars. They also became self-defense tools. In 1903, a New York woman named Leoti Blaker used her hatpin to fend off a man, as Mental Floss tells it. The hatpin as a weapon made headlines.

The Hatpin Laws ⚖️

Cities reacted with hatpin length laws:

  • 🏙️ Chicago, 1910: no hatpin point could stick out more than half an inch beyond the hat. The penalty was a $50 fine and arrest.
  • 🏜️ Nevada, 1912: the same half-inch rule, with up to a $500 fine or six months in jail.
  • 🏭 Milwaukee and Pittsburgh passed ordinances too.

Some rules required covered points. Women used makeshift caps, including potato pieces and cork, according to Wikipedia's hatpin page. 🥔 Want the full story? The Square PHX has a great deep dive.

Here Comes the Bob ✂️

In 1915, dancer Irene Castle cut her hair short for practical reasons. The "Castle bob" was born, as Smithsonian Magazine recounts. Fewer long pins would soon be needed. 👀

Meanwhile, decorative pieces got sparkly. A Mississippi State University collection holds a 1910 celluloid hair ornament in tortoiseshell coloring, with seven rhinestones at the top of its two wavy prongs. ✨

1920s: Flappers, Bobby Pins and Art Deco Combs ✨

The Roaring Twenties chopped it all off. By the mid-1920s, the bob haircut was the dominant women's hairstyle in the Western world. Louise Brooks made it iconic. 🖤

The numbers are wild. During the 1920s bob craze, US hairdressing shops grew from 5,000 in 1920 to 21,000 by the end of 1924, according to Smithsonian Magazine. F. Scott Fitzgerald even wrote a story about it: Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920). 📚

The Birth of the Bobby Pin 📌

Short hair needed a new kind of pin. The bobby pin is credited to Luis Marcus, a San Francisco cosmetics maker, after World War I. He first sold two handmade pins for 35 cents, and named them after bobbed hair, according to Wikipedia. 💡

Other popular 1920s hairstyles:

  • 🌊 Finger waves, set with lotion and clips
  • 🔥 Marcel waves, made with a hot curling iron
  • 👑 The bandeau, a band around the forehead, often glittering for evening, sometimes with a feather or a big jewel

Art Deco Combs and New Plastics 💎

The 1920s loved geometry and shine. Art Deco hair combs in celluloid, set with rhinestones, sparkled in bobbed and waved hair. The Met and the Cincinnati Art Museum both hold rhinestone combs from this era.

Two new vintage plastics joined celluloid:

  • 🥛 Galalith: a plastic made from milk protein, invented in 1897. It was used for hair combs and Art Deco jewelry. In 1913 alone, 30 million liters of milk went into Galalith in Germany, according to Wikipedia. 🐄
  • 🟠 Bakelite: invented by Leo Baekeland in 1907. It became a jewelry material from the 1920s. When his patents expired in 1927, makers like Catalin added 15 new colors. 🌈

French maker Auguste Bonaz, based in the comb town of Oyonnax, was famous for Art Deco combs. Remember that town name. It comes back in the 1980s! 😉

Meanwhile in Japan 🇯🇵

Japan's "modern girls" (moga) also cut their hair short. But traditional styles stayed, and with them, celluloid kanzashi. The Edo-Tokyo Museum holds a carved celluloid kanzashi with a chrysanthemum pattern from the Taishō to Shōwa period. Old hairpin, new material. 🌼

1930s: Jeweled Combs and the First Clear Plastics 💎

The 1930s kept the waves of the 20s, and evening looks got more glamorous. Jeweled hair accessories took center stage at night. 🎬

Want to see 1930s hair accessories? A 1936 issue of Australian Women's Weekly, archived by Glamour Daze, shows:

  • 💛 Hair combs with large colored stones set in gold
  • ✨ Paste clips (sparkling glass "jewels")
  • 🪶 Jeweled clasps with feathers
  • 🎀 Velvet ribbons

Plastics kept evolving. Acrylic was sold as Plexiglas from 1933. In the US, DuPont later sold it as Lucite. That clear, glassy look would shape vintage Lucite hair accessories for decades. 💧

🇨🇳 Shanghai style: in the 1930s, Shanghai was a capital of perms. The city had over 2,000 barbershops by 1930, according to Sixth Tone. The 1934 New Life Movement even tried to ban perms! 💇‍♀️

1940s: Victory Rolls and the Great Hairpin Shortage 🎖️

The 1940s look is instantly recognizable: victory rolls. Hair was backcombed, rolled and pinned into curves. The style peaked from 1940 to 1945. Where does the name come from? There are several theories, from fighter-plane maneuvers to the "V for Victory" campaign. ✌️

Working women also wore practical 1940s hair accessories:

  • 🧶 Snoods, knitted or crocheted hair nets (the Met holds one from about 1943)
  • 🌺 Hair flowers in rayon or silk, pinned along the hairline
  • 🧣 Turbans and headscarves

When Hairpins Went to War 🪖

Here's a fact that surprises everyone. During World War II, hairpins were rationed. Steel was needed for the war effort.

  • 📜 April 1942: the US War Production Board ordered hairpin and bobby pin makers to use about half as much metal as in 1941.
  • 🏭 Hump Hair Pin moved 80% of its production to army fuses. Ruth Goldberg argued that hairpins were essential, and won steel for them. The company received an Army-Navy "E" Award in 1945.
  • ♻️ "Victory Pins" packets asked women to reuse their pins to save steel.
  • 🇬🇧 In Britain, a 1942 newspaper reported hairgrip production at just one twentieth of prewar levels, with the steel going to barbed wire.

One of the most moving 1940s hairpins is at the Japanese American National Museum. A student made it between 1942 and 1945 at the Rohwer incarceration camp, wrapping horsehair into a flower on a bobby pin. 💔

1950s: French Twists, Chignons and Snap Clips 🎀

The 1950s were polished and feminine. The star updo was the French twist. Its big popularity began in the 1940s, and Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn made it legendary. 👑

Interesting detail: Wikipedia lists hair sticks among the ways to hold a French twist, along with clips, combs and bobby pins. The 1950s French twist is still one of the best vintage hair stick hairstyles. 🥢

Other 1950s hair accessories and styles:

  • 💁 The chignon, a low bun usually secured with barrettes or hairpins
  • 🎈 The bouffant, back in the early 1950s
  • 🎀 Flower clips, rhinestone side clips and tortoiseshell combs
  • 🧣 Silk scarves tied over the hair

And a new invention: Edward F. Zore was issued a patent for the snap clip in 1957, according to Wikipedia's hair clip page. 📎

1960s: The Beehive and Flower Power 🐝

In February 1960, Chicago hairdresser Margaret Vinci Heldt created the beehive hairstyle for Modern Beauty Shop magazine. She aimed for a 2:1 ratio of hair to face. The original mannequin is now at the Chicago History Museum, according to Wikipedia. 🏛️

The beehive needed teasing and a lot of hairspray. It could last over a week! Women wrapped their hair in toilet paper or scarves at night to protect it, as Mental Floss recalls. 😂 The 1960s beehive was worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), the Ronettes and Brigitte Bardot.

Then the decade flipped. By 1967, hippies wore flowers in their hair, headbands and headscarves. Hairspray out, flower power in. 🌸☮️

1970s: Boho Hair and Leather Stick Barrettes 🌼

The 1970s let hair down. Long straight hair, the shag and Farrah Fawcett's feathered style (1976) ruled. Accessories went earthy: headbands with beading, feathers and macramé, flower crowns and scarves. 🪶

The Afro pick became a visible political symbol too, a reminder that hair accessories carry meaning. ✊

And then there's that piece you've probably seen at a flea market: the leather barrette with a wooden stick. Tooled leather, hand-painted flowers, a wood pin through the middle. Many are sold today as 1970s pieces. It's basically a hair stick with a leather saddle. 🐎

📎 Another 1970s hair accessory first: the elongated hair clip was invented in 1972 by Marnie Bjornson.

1980s: Big Hair, Scrunchies and the First Claw Clips 💥

The 1980s went big. Perms became fashionable around 1982. Mousse, glitter and cans of Aqua Net did the rest. Princess Diana and the TV show Dynasty helped popularize the permed bouffant. 💇‍♀️

The Scrunchie 🎀

In 1987, Rommy Hunt Revson patented the scrunchie. She was inspired by the waistband of her sweatpants and used a $50 sewing machine. She named it the "Scunci", after her toy poodle, according to Wikipedia. 🐩

The Claw Clip 🦀

In 1986, Christian Potut's company opened its first factory in Oyonnax, France, and made the claw clip. His idea: combine a comb and a clip. Yes, Oyonnax, the same comb town where Auguste Bonaz made Art Deco combs in the 1920s! 🤯 Source: Wikipedia.

Add banana clips, giant bows and side ponytails, and you've got the full 80s look. 🍌

1990s: The Decade Hair Sticks Went Mainstream 🥢

Finally, the 90s hair stick trend! This is the decade when hair sticks became a mainstream Western accessory.

  • 📝 Romper lists chopsticks in buns among classic 90s hairstyles.
  • 📰 HuffPost UK counts "Chinese hair sticks" among the big 90s hair trends.
  • 📱 Harper's Bazaar Singapore calls hair chopsticks a 90s trend that came back on TikTok.
  • 🎪 Buns were a popular festival look in the 1990s, held with hair sticks or hair forks.

The other 90s icons? Butterfly clips, worn by Kirsten Dunst and Gwen Stefani. And the claw clip, made famous by Rachel Green on Friends. 🦋

Chopsticks or Real Hair Sticks? 🤔

The 90s trend often used actual chopsticks. Today, many people prefer real hair sticks, shaped and designed as jewelry. Some fashion moments, like the 2015 Met Gala, drew criticism for putting chopsticks in buns as a costume. The respectful way: choose a piece made for hair, and learn the culture behind it. 🌏

Hair Stick Materials Through the Decades: A Quick Timeline 🧪

Here's how vintage hairpin materials changed over the century:

  • 🐢 1900s: tortoiseshell, horn, bone, amber, early celluloid
  • ✨ 1910s: celluloid with rhinestones
  • 🥛 1920s: celluloid, Galalith, Bakelite, rhinestones
  • 💧 1930s: jeweled metal, paste, the first acrylics
  • 🪖 1940s: rationed steel, fabric flowers, snoods
  • 🎀 1950s: tortoiseshell-look combs, rhinestone clips
  • 🌸 1960s: hairspray (and fresh flowers!)
  • 🪵 1970s: leather, wood, beads, feathers
  • 🧴 1980s: fabric scrunchies, plastic clips
  • 🥢 1990s: wooden hair sticks and chopsticks, plastic butterfly clips and claw clips

⚠️ Collector's note: real tortoiseshell comes from the hawksbill sea turtle and was later banned from trade under CITES. If you love the look, choose a modern alternative. Old celluloid can also be fragile, so handle antique hairpins gently. 🐢💚

Why Vintage Hair Accessories Are Back 🔁

Fashion runs in circles, and hair is no exception. Retro hair accessories keep coming back, often thanks to social media.

  • 🦀 Claw clips: the 80s and 90s favorite is everywhere again.
  • 🥢 Hair sticks: Harper's Bazaar Singapore notes the 90s hair chopstick trend came back on TikTok.
  • 🎀 Scrunchies: once mocked, now a staple again.
  • 💎 Jeweled pins and combs: a favorite for weddings and vintage-themed events.

Why do we love them so much? A vintage-style hair stick is easy, gentle on hair and instantly makes a simple bun look styled. And it connects you to a hundred years of women who did exactly the same thing in front of their mirrors. 🪞💕

How to Get the Vintage Hair Stick Look Today ✨

You don't need a time machine. Here's a quick vintage hairstyle with hair sticks cheat sheet:

Never worn one? Our step-by-step hair stick guide on how to wear hair sticks covers the French twist, the classic bun and more. 🌀 And if pop culture is your thing, meet the anime characters with hair sticks. 🎎

Want to compare with other vintage hair accessory guides? LoveToKnow and Rau Antiques have good overviews, and Encyclopedia.com goes deep into the history. 📚

Vintage Hair Accessories FAQ ❓

When was the bobby pin invented?

The bobby pin is credited to Luis Marcus, a San Francisco cosmetics maker, after World War I. It became popular in the 1920s with bobbed hair, which gave it its name. 📌

Were hair sticks popular in the 1920s?

Not really. Most women had short bobs, so 1920s hair accessories were mostly bobby pins, clips, bandeaus and Art Deco combs. Long pins were for longer, traditional styles. ✂️

What were vintage hair combs made of?

Vintage hair combs were made of tortoiseshell, horn, bone and amber, then celluloid, Galalith and Bakelite, often set with rhinestones. 🪮

What is celluloid?

Celluloid is one of the first plastics, named in 1872. It was widely used to imitate tortoiseshell and ivory in combs and hairpins. 🧪

Why were there laws about hatpins?

Long hatpins could injure people in crowds. So hatpin laws appeared, like Chicago's 1910 rule that points couldn't stick out more than half an inch beyond the hat. 📏

Were hair sticks a 90s trend?

Yes. Hair sticks and chopsticks in buns were a classic 1990s look, alongside butterfly clips and claw clips. The trend came back on TikTok. 🥢

Were hairpins rationed in World War II?

Yes. In 1942, the US cut the metal allowed for hairpins and bobby pins to about half of 1941 levels. Wartime hairpin shortages also hit Britain. 🪖

How do I wear a vintage-style hair stick?

Start with a French twist or a low chignon. Slide one decorative hair stick through the base. Our hair stick guide shows every step. 🌀

Your Turn: Which Decade Is Your Hair Mood? 💬

From Gibson Girl pompadours to 90s chopstick buns, vintage hair accessories tell the story of women's lives: wars, freedom, glamour and rebellion. Now it's your turn to write the next chapter. ✨

Explore our Antique Hair Pins for timeless silver and crystal, or our Chinese Hair Pins for wood, flowers and pearls. Every order ships with free standard shipping in the US. 🚚

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Have a vintage hairpin story from your family? Tell us through our contact page. We read every message. 💌

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