The History of the Locket: From Renaissance Portrait Jewels to Victorian Keepsakes

The short, honest answer is that the locket as we know it, a pendant that opens to hold something small and personal, took shape gradually over roughly five centuries, from Renaissance portrait jewelry to Victorian mourning customs to the everyday photo lockets sold today. There is no single inventor and no single founding date. What follows is what the historical record actually supports, era by era, with the folklore kept out or clearly flagged.

Where the Word "Locket" Comes From

The word "locket" is older than the jewelry we associate with it today, and it originally had nothing to do with keepsakes. It traces to the Old French loquet, meaning a door-handle, bolt, or latch, itself a diminutive of the Old English loc, the same root behind the ordinary word "lock." The earliest documented English use, from the mid-1300s, described the iron cross-bar of a window. The meaning we recognize now, a small ornamental case with a hinged cover, most often holding a lock of hair or a miniature portrait, is recorded from the 1670s onward. In other words, the name describes the mechanism (something that fastens shut) well before it described the sentimental object.

Renaissance Origins: Portrait Jewels (1500s-1600s)

The locket's earliest confirmed ancestor is the Renaissance portrait jewel, a small hinged gold case built specifically to protect and display a painted miniature. European courts of the 1500s and 1600s treated these as serious diplomatic and romantic objects, not casual accessories. One of the earliest documented examples of the practice dates to 1526, when Marguerite, Duchesse d'Alençon, sent portraits of her two sons set in finely worked gold lockets to England's King Henry VIII, whose court also employed the miniature painter Lucas Horenbout. Surviving portrait-jewel lockets from this period, some holding work by miniaturists such as Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, are held today in institutions including the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. These pieces functioned as court gifts, tokens of favor, and family heirlooms, worn as jewelry but built around the idea of carrying an image of a specific, named person close to the body, which is the same basic function a locket serves now.

Pomanders: A Related but Separate Object

Pomanders were real, well-documented pieces of jewelry, but the evidence does not support treating them as an early version of the locket. A pomander (from the French pomme d'ambre, "amber apple") was a small case, often made of gold or silver and divided into hinged segments, carried or worn to hold strong-smelling substances such as ambergris, cloves, rosewater, or other spices and herbs. They were used from the medieval period through the Renaissance, worn as pendants or attached to a belt, and their scent was widely believed at the time to protect the wearer from "bad air," including during outbreaks of plague. That belief, and the object itself, are genuinely historical. What we could not confirm in any museum or academic source is a documented lineage connecting the pomander specifically to the later opening photo-and-hair locket. They are two different traditions, a scent container and a keepsake container, that both happen to be small hinged pendants worn close to the body. Popular jewelry blogs sometimes fold the two together into one origin story; we're not repeating that claim here because we couldn't verify it.

The 18th Century: Memorial and Mourning Lockets Take Hold

By the second half of the 1700s, lockets had become a standard, purpose-built way to memorialize a specific person, not just a container for a portrait. Britain in particular saw a strong trend toward memorial medallions and lockets from around 1760 onward, often ready-made with standardized neoclassical imagery, funerary urns, weeping willows, cherubs, that a buyer would then have personalized with an inscription or a lock of the deceased's hair, either preserved as a curl or worked into a design. This is also the period when lockets became closely tied to mourning specifically, alongside earlier informal traditions such as supporters of the executed King Charles I discreetly wearing his likeness after 1649. Colonial American jewelry of the same general era followed a similar pattern: sentimental pieces tied either to courtship and marriage or to death and remembrance, including lockets combining gold, hair, and crystal.

The Victorian Locket: Photography, Hair, and the Height of the Tradition (1837-1901)

Lockets reached their peak as an everyday sentimental object during the Victorian era, driven by two forces arriving close together: an established hairwork tradition and the new availability of photography. Photography was introduced to the general public in 1840, and it was quickly adapted to fit inside the same small hinged cases jewelers had been making for decades, so a locket could now hold an actual photographic likeness rather than only a painted one or a lock of hair. Queen Victoria's own mourning practice, wearing a large locket that held a photograph of Prince Albert on one side and a lock of his hair on the other after his death in 1861, set a visible public example that helped make photo-and-hair lockets one of the defining objects of Victorian sentimental jewelry. Historians describe Victorian hairwork jewelry as functioning almost like a "secular relic," a tactile, permanent memento of a specific person rather than a generic decorative motif, and soldiers giving a locket to a loved one before leaving for war became its own established custom that carried into the 20th century.

What People Actually Kept Inside Historical Lockets

The most consistently documented contents across five centuries are portraits and hair, with everything else being far less common. Painted miniature portraits came first, in the Renaissance and 1600s. Locks of hair appear by the 1600s and become dominant in the 1700s and especially the Victorian 1800s, sometimes displayed loose, sometimes woven into intricate patterns by specialist hairworkers. Photographs joined hair as a standard locket content from the 1840s onward and largely replaced painted portraits for everyday buyers, since a photograph was far cheaper and faster to obtain than a commissioned miniature. Religious tokens also appear in the historical record, for example small blessed wax disks worn by some pregnant women in earlier centuries as a protective amulet, a devotional use that predates and runs alongside the sentimental, secular use most people associate with lockets today.

The Modern Locket: From Heirloom to Everyday Keepsake

Today's locket keeps the same basic promise it has carried since the Renaissance: a small hinged compartment that lets you wear a specific memory rather than a generic decoration. What has changed is accessibility. A portrait-jewel locket in the 1500s was a diplomatic gift commissioned for royalty; a Victorian mourning locket was often a significant purchase tied to a real loss. A locket bought today can hold a printed photo, a lock of a baby's hair, a pressed flower, or nothing at all, and it costs a fraction of what either historical version did. The sentiment the object is built around, keeping someone or something close to your heart, has stayed remarkably constant even as the materials, the images inside, and the price have all changed.

Ready to shop the modern version? Our locket necklace guide covers styles, what to put inside, and how to choose one.

For more on what this piece has symbolized across generations, see our locket necklace meaning guide.

Frequently Asked Questions About Locket History

When were lockets invented?

There is no single invention date. The word "locket" is documented from the mid-1300s with a different meaning (a window fastening), and the earliest confirmed portrait-jewel lockets date to the 1500s and 1600s in Renaissance Europe. The object gradually developed into what we'd recognize as a keepsake locket over that period rather than being invented at one moment.

What is a locket used for?

A locket is used to carry a small, personal keepsake, historically a painted portrait, a lock of hair, or later a photograph, close to the body inside a hinged pendant. Its purpose has always been sentimental: keeping an image or physical trace of a specific person or moment with you rather than displaying a generic decorative motif.

What do you put in a locket?

Historically, people put painted portrait miniatures, locks of hair, and later photographs inside lockets. Modern lockets are still most commonly used for a small trimmed photo or a lock of hair, though some are worn empty as a symbol rather than filled with an object.

Did lockets originate from plague-era pomanders?

This is a popular claim online that we could not verify against a museum or academic source. Pomanders, scent-carrying pendants believed to ward off "bad air" during outbreaks including plague, were a real and separate historical object. We found no credible source documenting a direct lineage from pomanders to the opening photo-and-hair locket, so we treat them as related but distinct traditions rather than repeating that connection as fact.

Why did lockets become popular in the Victorian era?

Two things arrived close together: an already-established tradition of hairwork mourning jewelry, and the introduction of photography to the general public in 1840. Queen Victoria's own well-documented mourning locket, holding a photograph and a lock of Prince Albert's hair after his 1861 death, is widely credited with reinforcing the custom's popularity across British and American society.

What is the difference between a locket and a pendant?

All lockets are pendants, but not all pendants are lockets. A pendant is any decorative piece that hangs from a chain. A locket is specifically a pendant built with a hinged or friction-fit compartment that opens, which is the feature that has defined the object since the word took on its modern meaning in the 1670s.