Silver Locket: Complete Guide to Selecting, Wearing, and Care

Introduction: A Small Treasure Box Around Your Neck

Picture this scene. Late 19th century, London, a residential neighborhood near Hammersmith. A young woman stands before the mirror, fastening a delicate chain with an oval silver locket. Inside, behind a carefully inserted glass circle, hides a tiny photograph of her husband, away on business to India for half a year. No messages, no video calls. Just this piece of silver, which she puts on every morning and takes off every evening, placing it on the bedside table to view before sleep.

The locket lives precisely in that space between jewelry and personal diary. On the outside, it's beautiful and meaningful like any good pendant. On the inside, it holds what isn't shared with strangers: a photograph, a strand of hair, a note on the thinnest paper, a dried petal.

Today, silver lockets are experiencing a genuine renaissance. It's not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. The reason is that the demand for jewelry with personal meaning, for objects that carry something concrete and uniquely one's own, has proven more durable than many other fashion trends. In an era where photographs exist only in clouds and are never printed, the physical photograph inside a silver locket has gained entirely new significance. This is a conscious choice to preserve something material from the digital stream.

This guide covers everything: what a locket is and how it differs from an ordinary pendant, its history, what types and forms exist, how to choose the right size, how to insert a photograph, what else can be stored inside, how to select a quality piece, how to wear it, and how to care for it.

What is a Locket and How it Differs from a Pendant

The word locket comes from the French "médaillon," which traces back to the Italian "medaglione" and ultimately to Latin "medallia." A locket is a pendant with a hollow interior. It opens like a little book on a hinge or via a magnetic mechanism, allowing you to store something personal: a photograph, a strand of hair, a note, a small dried flower.

The key difference from a pendant is functional. A pendant is decorative jewelry with no interior space. It's beautiful only on the outside. A locket adds another dimension: it exists simultaneously as jewelry for the eyes and as a container for what the wearer carries. This dual nature makes a locket an entirely different object in terms of meaning and the wearer's relationship to it.

Confusion arises because lockets are often sold as "pendant lockets" or simply "pendants," and the word has multiple meanings in English. In the jewelry context, a locket always means an opening pendant with an interior cavity.

There are also items that imitate a locket's form but are monolithic: they don't open and have no interior cavity. Technically, these are simple pendants in locket form, not true lockets. Sellers sometimes use "locket" for aesthetic appeal without clarifying the function. Therefore, always verify at purchase whether the piece opens.

There's also common confusion between a locket and a reliquary. A reliquary is traditionally a small pouch or leather case for carrying religious items, talismans, or herbs. This is a different construction and tradition. A locket is jewelry made of metal with an opening mechanism.

Brief History: From the Tudors to the 20th Century

The First Lockets: Portraits of Kings and Queens

The history of lockets as jewelry begins in the 15th-16th centuries in Europe. The first lockets contained not photographs (photography hadn't been invented yet) but tiny portraits, painted in watercolor on ivory, parchment, or thin wood. They were worn by aristocracy, and their purpose was direct: to carry a portrait of the monarch or beloved constantly with oneself.

The English Tudor court particularly loved such jewelry. Henry VIII gifted lockets bearing his portrait as a sign of special favor. Elizabeth I, according to accounts of her courtiers, wore a locket with a portrait of her mother Anne Boleyn—who was executed when Elizabeth was about three years old—until the end of her life. This surviving testimony shows how a locket served to maintain connection with what was lost.

In the 16th-17th centuries, both genders wore lockets. Male lockets with monarchs' portraits were elements of demonstrating loyalty and court status. Female lockets displayed images of beloved ones or children.

Miniature Portrait: Art in Coin-Size

Parallel to locket development emerged a special artistic tradition: the miniature portrait. This is painting in the format of 5-10 centimeters, rendered with fine brushes on ivory or parchment, with detail rivaling large canvas paintings. Such a portrait was placed in a locket and served simultaneously as jewelry, portrait, and personal message.

Artists specializing in miniatures were highly esteemed at courts of the 17th-18th centuries. Entire schools of such painting existed in England, France, and the Netherlands. Nicholas Hilliard in England, Jean-Étienne Liotard in Geneva, Rosalba Carriera in Venice. Their small portraits are preserved in museum collections worldwide.

Victorian Era: The Heyday of the Mourning Locket

The true golden age of lockets began in the 19th century, especially in Victorian Britain. After Prince Albert's death in 1861, Queen Victoria began wearing a large black locket containing his photograph and a strand of his hair. Photography had been invented by then: daguerreotypes since 1839, and by the 1850s, paper photographic prints were common enough to fit in a locket.

Victoria wore mourning and carried the locket with Albert until the end of her life, for another forty years. This public gesture set the tone for the entire epoch. Mourning jewelry became a complete social norm: grief was expressed through concrete objects.

Death was part of daily life in the 19th century. Child mortality remained high. Cholera epidemics regularly decimated entire city districts. Men died in wars, at sea, in mines, and in factories. Mourning jewelry became the means to physically preserve something from the deceased: a strand of hair, a tiny portrait, a photograph.

The locket made it possible to carry a strand of hair or a small photographic print. Hair occupied a special place in 19th-century memorial culture. By mid-century, England annually imported dozens of tons of human hair from continental Europe, so great was the demand: hair of the deceased was woven into jewelry, used to create portrait vignettes, and stored in lockets.

Silver was the material of the educated middle class in this period. Gold lockets were worn by nobility. Silver ones were accessible to a broader circle: the apothecary's wife, the schoolteacher, the country priest's daughter. This made the locket a truly mass-produced item.

20th Century Photo-Lockets and Wars

By the early 20th century, photography had become accessible to practically everyone. Specialized photo studios offered "cards for lockets": small prints in the necessary format. The opening of specialized services meant that a photo locket became an ordinary item, not a rarity.

During World War I, vast numbers of people on both sides possessed photo lockets. Women carried photographs of husbands and sons going to the front. Soldiers took photo lockets of wives and children—objects physically connecting them to home. The same lockets were worn during World War II.

After the mid-20th century, the locket somewhat fell from fashion, giving way to other pendant types. But it never completely disappeared. Today it's returning precisely because the digital era created a paradox: there are more photographs than ever, yet none are physical objects.

Conclusion

The locket remains one of the few jewelry pieces with a function that cannot be reduced to aesthetics. It stores. A photograph, a strand of hair, a note, a date. Something concrete and personal, visible only to the wearer or to whomever they choose to show.

Sterling silver for a locket is chosen for practical reasons: it's durable, holds its form well, and takes engraving beautifully. It's more affordable than gold but more enduring and noble than silver-plated alloys. With proper selection, a good hinge, and appropriate care, a silver locket will serve for decades.

A well-chosen locket of the right size, with a reliable hinge and tested silver, becomes an object with history. Like those Victorian lockets that still open with a light click and preserve something of people gone a century and a half ago.