The Wikipedia article on this is definitely interesting. First it cites The Hairdresser’s Journal from 1863 which provides plenty of information on hair theft, but doesn’t cite any sources itself. Obviously in the 19th century newspapers printed stories of hair theft, this can be found in the Wiki article or today you can find several current articles about this simply by googling “beware hair thieves.”

Perhaps a little surprising is that there hasn’t been a scholarly work, as far as I can tell, on the topic of hair stealing, so I will be forced to use newspaper accounts as my main sources, forgive me.

An article from 1882 in the New York Times, who was reprinting it from the Pall Mall Gazette, tells of a man who was sentenced to six months in prison for the theft of 87 pounds of Swedish human hair and selling it as horsehair at a value of $400 for the whole lot. The man, Lotze, was selling them to hairdressers so that they could make wigs. The article speculates that many hairdressers will face punishment and any ladies who had bought wigs made of stolen hair would be forced to give them up to the authorities.

On this side of the atlantic, stealing hair was a bit more serious. It seems that the more common crime was stealing the hair after it had already been detached from the person. This was the case for Henry Willis who stole nine “switches” of human hair valued at $105 from the show-case of John Delir. Mr. Willis was sentenced to four years in the State Prison.

There is the jarring report from Boston where a young woman was walking out of a hall and felt a tug on her hair, she looked back to find someone had cut her ponytail. The would-be hair thief was foiled however because her hair was put in place with pins and so made it too difficult to spirit away.

These are just a few examples from one source, of course. But in two of those cases it is apparent that the hair was being stolen for profit. The profit to be made was for wig makers. The popularity of wigs led to a high price for hair, which led the motivation to steal hair. The decline of the wig, we can logically determine, might have led to the decline in the hair thief.

This leads us to wigs. Much like hair theft, scholars seem to be silent on an extensive history of wig popularity. In 1855 in a rather colorful article in Crayon titled “Wigs and Their Wearers,” the unnamed author goes through the many styles and popularities of wigs but ends with the doubtful exclamation that from the point that Benjamin Franklin entered the court of France without a wig, wigs have belonged only to history. This, of course, makes little sense considering that people decades after this were stealing hair to sell to wigmakers. We know that Egyptians wore wigs and Romans apparently preferred blonde wigs made from German slave hair. There were the famous powdered wigs and the wigs worn in British courts.

The Wikipedia on Wigs states “Full wigs in the 19th and early 20th century were not fashionable.” and “During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century hairdressers in England and France did a brisk business supplying postiches, or pre-made small wiglets, curls, and false buns to be incorporated into the hairstyle.” The first statement has no source and the second comes from a book called “Hairstyles and Fashion: A Hairdresser’s History of Paris, 1910 - 1920,” which might be a good source, but I have no idea.

However a search of the New York Times after 1900 shows no cases of hair theft being reported, at least for the first decade of the century. We can only assume there was some unseen moment when criminals saw no profit in stealing human hair. Many decades later they would turn to stealing hair extensions.

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[TO JAIL FOR STEALING HAIR, Dec. 31, 1882, New York Times] (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9404EFDD153DE533A25752C3A9649D94639FD7CF)

THE HUMAN HAIR THIEF, Feb. 09, 1875, New York Times

ATTEMPTED THEFT OF A LADY’S HAIR, Oct. 27, 1879, New York Times

“Wigs and their Wearers,” The Crayon, Vol. 1, No. 20, (May 16, 1855), pp. 310-312