Par le Creative Museum (The English translation can be found in the first comment.)
Pour les cultures occidentales, le peigne en bois a souvent été le parent pauvre de l’ornement de coiffure. La plupart du temps, on utilisait le bois pour fabriquer des peignes de toilette, mais on l’oubliait dès qu’il s’agissait de créer un bijou pour les cheveux. On lui préférait alors des matériaux plus nobles comme l’écaille, l’argent, la corne ou même le plastique, enrichi de pierres du Rhin.
On peut trouver cependant des réalisations artisanales qui nous offrent des modèles en bois pleins de charme et il serait vraiment dommage de les ignorer. Les créateurs d’aujourd’hui pourraient bien en faire un matériau privilégié car il offre des possibilités décoratives non négligeables. On peut le sculpter ou garder ses lignes pures, le polir, le peindre, le laquer ou encore l’embellir avec d’autres matières.
Voici quelques exemples qui sont en eux-mêmes un éloge du bois.
American wood comb with silver and pink stones decoration
Buffalo figure carved out of clear wood.
Old black lacquered wood comb with typical East European painting
To see more European wooden combs, you may click here.
In Western culture, wooden combs have often been cast aside as the stepchildren of “real” hair ornaments. Mostly, wood was used to make functional items for personal grooming and forgotten when artists chose materials to create decorative hair jewelry. They preferred finer materials, such as tortoiseshell, silver, horn or rhinestone-studded plastic.
However, The Creative Museum has a collection of charming handcrafted wooden combs. It would be a shame to ignore them. Today’s comb makers might prefer wood. With technological advancement, it offers significant decorative opportunities. Wood can be sculpted into many sleek shapes, polished, painted, lacquered, or embellished with other materials.
Here are some examples of European wooden combs, which are in themselves a eulogy for the artists’ choice to ignore the material. For more of The Creative Museum’s collection of wooden combs, please click this link: http://www.creative-museum.com/en/search/node/europe%20wood
I am sorry if I am gratuitously pointing out something that is already covered in the French language version of this article. However, the “gems” in the first wood comb depicted on this article are either natural Rhodochrosite (probably from either Argentina or Chile) or the best quality Rhodochrosite fake I have ever seen. This is particularly impressive because Rhodochrosite is fairly fragile and difficult to work with. Most jewelers avoid working with this material in any practical setting because it so prone to breakage. Really a lovely piece.