Vintage 1960s Metal Hair Pick Comb & Brush – Black Lady Handle – NOS on Card 🖤

Size: 6 inches ~ new old stock, sealed and unopened on its card, the colors still bright. They vary a little one to the next.

💇🏾‍♀️ Comb & Brush, Sealed Since the Card Was Printed

This is a Black Americana hair pick, still factory-sealed on its original "comb & brush" header card. The card art is a woman with long flowing hair streaked in pink lines, three flowers tucked in above her ear, peeking over a white folding fan held in a hand with long red-painted nails — "comb &" and "brush" lettered right across the fan itself. There's a small circular monogram logo down in the corner and "MADE IN HONG KONG" printed at lower left. The pick underneath is twelve long, straight metal teeth set into a glossy black moulded handle carved as a stylized woman's head: hair swept up into a top-knot with incised lines, downcast closed eyes, a small nose and mouth, and a long neck that forms the grip.

🪮 A Pick With a Real Patent History

The long-tooth lifting pick — the kind built to tease and lift rather than just detangle — has actual patents behind it. Samuel H. Bundles Jr. and Henry M. Childrey patented the form in 1969, with a folding version filed the following year and granted in 1971. Anthony R. Romani designed his famous raised-fist handle in 1972 and patented it in 1976. This one's a plainer, mass-market piece from that same wave of long-tooth picks that hit drugstore and beauty-supply pegboards once the form caught on.

👑 Carved Handles Go Back Much Further Than the 1960s

The idea of a comb with a handle carved as a human head isn't a mid-century invention at all — it's a very old African form. In 2013, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge ran an exhibition called "Origins of the Afro Comb: 6,000 Years of Culture, Politics and Identity," curated by Sally-Ann Ashton, tracing combs from a 5,500-year-old Egyptian example right up through the modern pick, and noting that handles were traditionally "decorated with objects of status, such as the headrest, human figures." This little mass-produced piece, moulded in black plastic in a Hong Kong factory, is a cheap, cheerful descendant of a tradition that's thousands of years older than the card it's stapled to.

🇭🇰 Made in Hong Kong, Sold to the World

By the end of the 1960s Hong Kong factories were turning out toys and plastics for Hasbro and Mattel, and in 1972 Hong Kong actually passed Japan as the world's largest toy exporter, with household plastics as one of its biggest lines and the American market as the main customer. Plenty of sibling designs made it into that trade — Elizabeth Albert's "The Piks" carried a similar sculpted head handle, and William Marvy Co. of St. Paul, Minnesota sold its own African-figure picks under the Marvy Quality Products name — which tells me this style of head-handle pick was a common item across more than one maker, not a one-off design.