Hair is where I get off
 

An Abraham Lincoln cut signature/hair piece card sold on ebay last month for $17,500. There are random inserts in 2009 packs with 1/1 hair redemptions of anyone from Beethoven to Larry Fine of the 3 Stooges.

http://www.examiner.com/x-5758-Chica...-to-Larry-Fine

Hair is one item I just don't see myself ever collecting. Anyone here into hair collecting?

Freaky !!!!!!
 

I hope it was from the top of his head and not somewhere else. I think it is very creepy and voodoo-ish. My neighbor has some really old freaky china dolls that have hair from her great aunt, grandmother, ect ect and it is scary, I would be scared to be in her living room or house alone at night. I think a card like that could conjure up a ghost or other spirits. Let the dead rest in peace.

In a certain way, I can understand the appeal collecting celebrity hair, but could never get involved due to (in most cases) the huge leaps of faith required to buy such material in the first place. Locks of hair, celebrity or otherwise, were commonly collected until the turn of the last century. Heck, women even used to fashion jewelery out of a lock of a departed loved one's strands.

Doesn't eBay have a "no body parts" rule? If hair's OK, then what about finger/toe nails, eyelashes/brows, etc.?

Thanks Jodi. Now everyone is going to raise my opening bids for celebrity toe nails. :eek:

Collecting, or at least keeping, hair is an age old thing. A Civil War soldier might carry a locket of his wife's hair into battle. You can find Daguerreotype jewelry with hair of the pictured person inside.

I talked with a science professor about celebrity hair, and, for a celebrity long dead, he didn't know how you would scientifically identify the hair as being his or hers, without already having known genuine hair for comparison. Even if you can identify it as being from the family, as the granddaughter is still living and you can examine her hair, that doesn't by itself match the questioned hair to the individual. After all, if the black hair in auction came from Ted Williams' hairbrush, that doesn't automatically mean Ted was the only one in the Williams family using the brush. He said maybe there were times where the circumstantial evidence, including provenance, is very compelling, and where the hair may have supporting general qualities (black, blonde, thick, etc), but he didn't see how anyone was doing scientific matching of F. Scott Fitzgerald's or John Pershing's hair.

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That might be correct about the Woolly Mammoth hair card being more reliable. For positive verification, the scientist only has to narrow it down to the species. I would assume there are many qualified experts out there who can verify the species of animal, especially considering there aren't many hairy elephants walking around anymore.

Sounds like it might be easier to authenticate a witch's prayer blanket than 150-year old hair...