Celebrity hair jam--er, yum?

Jam made from Princess Diana's hair

JAM made from one of Princess Diana's hairs has been selling well at an art exhibition in London.
Sam Bompas, who founded catering company Bompas and Parr, says a tiny speck of the late Princess of Wales' hair has been infused with gin, then combined with milk and sugar to make the preserve, which tastes like condensed milk.

Mr Bompas says he bought the hair off eBay for $US10 ($12) from a US dealer who collects celebrity hair.

This works more as surrealism than food for a variety of reasons. First, the mention of jam with hair in it creates an unpleasant image of something not sanitary (I recall Davy Jones in The Monkees' film Head jokingly requesting a "glass of cold gravy with a hair in it", which made me viscerally grimace the same way--unclean!). But in this case--the hair in the jam is the point. It's supposed to be a minuscule amount, but this leads to a number of interesting cultural questions--

Is any hair the right amount to have in one's jam? And of course, does it matter that the person whose hair it was was a celebrity?

It's infused with gin (might I add, a very English spirit)--so does the alcohol sterilize the weirdness of it being "hair jam"?

And finally--just who is buying this? Because there are some definitely strange and intense people in this peculiar old world, some you might even say have stalkerly-intensity. Are there cults of Diana-worshippers, whose literal renderings of certain archetypes have poetically apotheosized Prince Charles' ex-wife into a goddess-figure whose very hair preserved in a jam (whose ingredient list actually seems a bit easily perishable) would serve as an agreeable sacrament for? Or are they just carefree memorabilia hounds snapping up the jars to sit next to the Royal Wedding hand-painted plates and other Anglophile tourist tat?

(At my darkest imaginings, I envision a solitary paparazzo, gutted with guilt, purchasing jar after jar through proxies and spending sad nights remembering the night she died while slathering the jam on stale crumpets and numbly swallowing each gobby mouthful part in penance and part in some sympathetic-magic urge to incorporate some of her nous into his own corpus and carry her like a cross of fat about his middle for the rest of his life.)

Or, you know, the the usual jam-fetishists. Gooseberries. Poblano chiles. Hair of deceased royalty. All in a day's collections.

It also works more as art because, of course, it's obviously going to depreciate in value once you pry the lid off. There is very little market for used jam. And I can't say I know of any market for used jam with hair in it.

The real down-side though, is with appraisal. All things considered, is it worth anyone's while to DNA-test a batch to see if it really has her hair? (Although this is pointless without a follicle tip I understand. Naturally, one can't expect that from hair purchased at auction and subsequently infused with gin. What a perfect crime for forgers! One could bootleg celebrity-hair jam from Fido's brush for a very profitable period of time.)

It's not exactly something that goes with my decor, personally, as I prefer more traditional objets d'art. Your purloined finger-bones assembled into bird-cages, and miniature books bound wholly in mouse ears. You know the sort of thing.