I won’t try to fool you. I am not an expert in bobby pins (also called bobbing pins, kirby grips or hair grips). But I do have some interest in these pins and I can tell you that this metal hair-holder-upper is, as ye olde Wiki states, “a small double-pronged clip that slides into hair with the prongs open and then the flexible prongs close over the hair to hold it in place. They are typically plain and unobtrusively colored, but some are elaborately decorated or jeweled. Bobbing pins became popular in the 1920s to hold the new bobbed hairstyles.”
Some of those hairstyles are illustrated in this small assortment of bobby pins clipped to sales cards. Like so many other seemingly insignificant consumer items, bobby pins were sold to the public (during the ’20s through the ’50s), like razor blades, with a modicum of contemporary style and illustrative panache.
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