Lifestyle
What Did Valentines Day Cards Look Like 200 Years Ago?
In the late 19th century, few things telegraphed yearning like a card adorned with paper lace, gold foil and a couple exchanging a coy glance.
Today, such a card would evoke an eye roll.
The evolution of cards from the treacly confections of Victorian England to the quippy missives of today reflect both shifting design aesthetics and broader cultural customs around romance. As the borders of socially accepted relationships have shifted, so have the cards. Where once there was poetry, now there are drawings of pizzas.
“Greeting cards are a reflection of society,” said Carlos Llansó, executive director of the Greeting Card Association, a trade organization that represents roughly 4,000 independent card makers.
Valentine’s Day cards today are less formal, precious and prescribed, Mr. Llansó said, because our understanding of love has become more expansive.
Lottery and lace
Historians struggle to trace the exact origins of Valentine’s Day — some pinpoint the holiday to a curiously unromantic Pagan festival in Rome that involved goat slaughter and nudity — but they tend to agree that its association with romance was most likely established in England.
Early Valentine’s Day celebrations, dating as far back as the 17th century, were only loosely associated with love and often revolved around a lottery, said Sally Holloway, a cultural historian at the University of Warwick whose research focuses on love, marriage and courtship in 18th century England.
People would pull names out of a hat and select someone to be their Valentine from February through Easter.
“Your Valentine could be your neighbor, it could be a colleague, it could be a member of your family,” Dr. Holloway said. “You’d pin the name of the person who you’d been given as your Valentine to your clothes.” Matched pairs would exchange gifts, dance together and maybe write funny riddles or poems for each other.
A confluence of rapid social changes in the late 1700s and early 1800s, including the idealization of marrying for love rather than for economic advantage, Dr. Holloway said, helped to transform Valentine’s Day into a commercialized celebration of romantic love with a partner of your choosing.
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This period dovetailed with the advent of new printing technologies and mass production, as well as an expansion of postal services, making Valentine’s Day cards a popular component of courtship rituals.
They presented, in many ways, a rare opportunity to directly convey desire within the confines of an otherwise buttoned-up Victorian society, where bold romantic declarations could be both risky and risqué. At the time, the responsibility of pursuing a marriage partner fell to men, and women tended to avoid overtly signaling affection.
But on Valentine’s Day, those rules were flipped.
“For one day a year, the language of love became the preserve of women,” Dr. Holloway said. And because it was considered a daring and even racy act to send a Valentine’s Day card, women “couldn’t put their name to it,” Dr. Holloway said. It is why so many cards from that era contain only vague, brief greetings, sometimes with a question mark at the end, adding a whiff of mystique.
The custom arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s, and crafty, entrepreneurial women fueled its commercialization.
Esther Howland — often referred to as the “mother of the American valentine” — is said to have first received a Valentine’s Day card from someone in Britain in 1847 and was inspired to create her own version.
“It was her idea to essentially create an assembly line of women putting together these really complex Valentines,” said Jamie Kwan, an assistant curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The cards were handmade, and Howland “imported materials from the U.K. and Germany to incorporate into these cards.”
Estimates suggest she sold between $75,000 and $100,000 worth of cards a year, roughly the equivalent of $3 million today.
Embracing new ideas of love
Over time, innovation around the craftsmanship of cards slowed, and it was their imagery that began to reflect a rapidly changing culture.
In 1910, Hallmark entered the industry and quickly became one of the largest and most recognizable card makers. The brand’s earliest Valentine’s Day cards relied heavily on the Victorian symbols of love from the previous century: hearts, Cupids and lovebirds.
By the 1930s, Hallmark started printing cards with boundary-pushing images of couples embracing and, by 1945, dancing.
“It used to be that we used a lot more traditional forms of creative crafts, like engraving, calligraphy and lace,” said Jen Walker, a vice president of Hallmark’s creative studios. Eventually, consumers found those aesthetic details less enticing.
“We are a consumer led brand — so we followed the consumer and what their needs were,” she added.
But Hallmark cards did not display Black couples until 1970, and the company did not introduce Valentine’s Day cards for those in same-sex relationships until 2008.
‘There isn’t even a heart on it’
In the mid 2000s, Valentine’s Day cards went through another major shift.
In 2013, Emily McDowell, a writer, product consultant and business adviser, designed a Valentine’s Day card to better reflect some of the difficult-to-categorize situationships she had been in.
The card had no illustrations. It was plain and white with text on the front that read: “I know we’re not, like, together or anything but it felt weird to just not say anything so I got you this card. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t really mean anything. There isn’t even a heart on it. So basically it’s a card saying hi. Forget it.”
She put it up on Etsy, anticipating that only a handful of people would buy it.
Within days, she sold thousands, she said, and had to stop accepting new orders. The success prompted her to quit her job in advertising and start her namesake brand. The next year, she released another card that also instantly became a hit. It read: “There’s no one I’d rather lie in bed and look at my phone next to.”
Over the past 13 years, the company has sold millions of similarly witty cards. (Ms. McDowell left the company in 2022, and it was acquired by Hachette Publishing last year.) While Ms. McDowell’s early designs feel commonplace now, they were among the first in an industrywide move away from the stilted, saccharine Valentine’s Day cards of previous decades.
Many independent card designers today, Mr. Llansó explained, continue to tap into a consumer demand for plain-speaking, authentic cards. As a result, some of the more popular designs feature references to the state of the world. Others nod to cultural iconography, like Labubus or the enduring appeal of sweatpants. Not all of them are intended for romantic partners, and many can be used in other kinds of relationships.
Mitzi Sampson, the founder of the card company Mitzi Bitsy Spider, said her best-selling card was one that featured a grinning raccoon holding up a sign reading “you are TRASH to me.”
Ms. Sampson said she designed that card in 2023 for her sister “because she loves raccoons and because I love her.”
That, she added, is exactly what consumers want now. Not frills or grand proclamations, but an intimate knowledge of the receiver and “the simple recognition that says I know you, I see you, I choose you.”
Azar Nafisi on the set of Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran
Marie Gioanni/Greenwich Entertainment
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A new film version of Azar Nafisi’s critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi’s home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi’s way to fight back.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, “I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children.”
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.
It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.
Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran.
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Greenwich Entertainment
“These girls were very different, one from the other,” Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.
“Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn’t talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect,” she said.
Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. “It reached a sort of magic,” she said.
The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi’s homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized
“This wasn’t my land,” she told Simon. “This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death.”
When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.
“The expression on her face is fear, because by and by, she disappears into this garment,” Nafisi said. For some, the headscarf was a symbol of the place of women in society, but for Nafisi the stakes were even higher.
“This is not a political fight. This is an existential one,” she said. “Our identity as human beings, as women, has been taken away from us.”
When fighting against covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi found small ways to rebel. “I never wore my scarf properly. I would always show a few strands out of the scarf to tell them, ‘You don’t own me.’”
Nafisi’s book about fighting the Iranian Revolution through the simple act of reading was an international bestseller, won numerous literary awards, and was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to make a passionate case for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of Islamic Revolution. The new leaders tore down the statues of the king and the royal family and changed the names of streets. But when they tried to bring down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, and erase his place of honor within the culture, the people opposed it.
“I thought how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can’t touch the poet,” she said.
Get ready to catch a whiff of stink. Not one, but two rare corpse flowers are set to bloom at the Huntington in the coming days, with one of them making its first-ever public bloom.
If both plants unfurl on the same day, it would be just the second time a double bloom has ever occurred at the Huntington.
For those unfamiliar with these funky flora, be warned. Corpse flowers bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, and once opened, they reek of gym socks, rotten eggs and decaying flesh … or, well, a corpse.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids for the Huntington, speaks to reporters in front of two corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Couple that with their tropical native climate of Sumatra, Indonesia, and you’re in for a sweaty, stinky viewing experience.
The stench is important for pollination, said Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator of orchids. It attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which lay their eggs on rotting animal carcasses.
At the Huntington, pollinators aren’t the only thing it entices. Since the garden exhibited its first corpse flower in 1999, thousands of people flock to its conservatory every summer, just to smell these putrid plants.
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It smells like rotting flesh, but thousands of people will be lining up to catch a whiff.
“The kids that first came in 1999 are now bringing their kids — their own kids — to experience this over 20 years later,” Tam said. “It’s amazing, this plant, the impact that it has had over many generations.”
Glendale resident Trinity Shi, 42, witnessed three blooms at the Huntington in 2022 and 2023 and compared the smell to rotten fish: pungent, but not unbearable. She was excited to feature such an unusual specimen on her Instagram plant blog, @cubehousejungle, and hopes to make it to this year’s bloom too.
“It feels really prehistoric to look at this plant, because it is so giant,” Shi said of the corpse flower, which can grow over 12 feet tall. “It’s become kind of like a mascot for the Huntington.”
Thanks to cultivation techniques, the Huntington coaxes the plants to bloom every two to three years, not four to six like they do in their natural habitat, where they’re endangered.
Still, the blooms are notoriously unpredictable, Tam said. He guessed one of the plants will bloom in the coming days.
This upcoming bloom spotlights a plant nicknamed Odora, who last opened in 2024, and Odorysseus, a rookie public bloomer. Visitors offered name suggestions for Odorysseus on the Huntington’s Instagram page, where contenders included Stinkerbell, Gagatha and Count Flatula, among others.
It’s not unusual for the Huntington to have multiple soon-to-be bloomers on display. But only once, in 2018, did two plants actually unfurl on the same day.
A detailed view of a corpse flower as it prepares to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
For Odora and Odorysseus, siblings from a 2002 pollination, a double bloom is unlikely, Tam said. The plants are inclined to bloom out of sequence, “because they want to pollinate another plant that’s in the vicinity.” That can’t happen if they bloom simultaneously.
Though many refer to these plants as “flowers,” they are actually an “inflorescence,” a flowering structure containing hundreds of smaller blooms inside.
When it’s almost time for the plant to open, the spadix — a conic protrusion from inside the plant — emerges and accelerates in growth, climbing up to six inches per day. After a few days, its growth slows down.
“When it gets to about the one-inch range, we’ll know it’s about to bloom for us fairly soon,” Tam said.
When it does bloom, the spathe — leaflike structures encasing the plant — unfurl around 3 or 4 p.m., reaching maximum size in the early hours of the morning. The odor comes from the spadix, which heats up to about 98 degrees to strengthen the smell.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids at the Huntington, walks past the corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
From there, visitors have until about 3 to 5 p.m. to smell the plant before it closes back up and collapses, losing its odor. Eventually, the plant returns as a leaf or a flower, photosynthesizing energy in preparation for its next bloom.
Today, the Huntington houses 43 corpse flowers, making it one of the largest corpse flower collections in North America. The Huntington cultivates them on-site and has distributed many to botanic gardens and zoos across the country.
“It’s important when it comes to conservation that we make plants accessible,” Tam said. “If we’re able to share these plants with other organizations and other hobbyists, we’re able to decrease the amount of plant theft that occurs in the wild, where a lot of conservation work is much needed.”
Eager sniffers can visit the Huntington from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Monday. Be sure to stay hydrated, cool and patient, as it’s humid inside the conservatory and lines can be long. For those who want to track the blooms’ progress from afar, catch the Huntington’s online livestream.
Library, art museum, botanical garden
The Huntington
Address: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
Admission: $13-34; children 3 and under, free; “Museums for All” (SNAP EBT) program, $5.
Info: huntington.org
Entrepreneur David Huang tests out a VR headset while conducting demonstrations of the social dance lesson app Dance Guru at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., June 17, 2026.
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Chloe Veltman/NPR
Wedding season is in full swing, bringing with it a familiar sense of dread for anyone who fears the dance floor.
But relief may finally be at hand with the help of a new app, Dance Guru, and a virtual reality (VR) headset.
The social dance instruction app transports users to a spacious, digital dance studio. Waiting inside is a computer-generated coach: a handsome, male avatar wearing a shirt open to his navel. He speaks with a slightly gravelly English accent.
“Watch me now,” he instructs at the start of a waltz lesson — which NPR tried out at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.
The avatar then demonstrates a basic box step.
From there, the lesson becomes interactive. The coach tells the user to hold his hand while an electric pinging sound tracks the student’s foot placement.
“One, two, three, four, five, six,” the virtual teacher counts down.
When the user stumbles, he remains remarkably patient. “Do not worry, foundations take time. Let’s try that again. Work on grounding your steps more intentionally.”
Solving the beginner’s dilemma
Dance Guru creator David Huang said he came up with the idea for the app a couple of years ago out of frustration.
“I always wanted to learn to dance and I was always terrible at it,” Huang said. “And I always ended up stopping midway through the lessons.”
He soon realized that many beginners hit the exact same roadblocks.
“Private lessons are too expensive, and you feel like you’re always forgetting the dance steps,” Huang said. “You cannot find a partner to dance with. So I figured maybe I can create something like this.”
The Dance Guru platform currently offers tutorials in salsa, bachata, waltz, and cha-cha, in both lead and follow modes. To make the digital instruction feel authentic, Huang used motion-capture technology to record the movements of real-life dance teachers — with their permission.
Building on the legacy of online tutorials and video games
Dance Guru belongs to a small but growing wave of apps using VR to demystify social dance. At a nearby booth, conference attendee Victor Chen is testing out a competing app called Trip the Light. It currently offers salsa lessons, as well as freestyle options, where a user can dance with a partner without having to learn specific steps.
Trip the Light’s booth at the Augmented World Expo included posters of the app’s virtual instructors. Real-life performers, who gave Trip the Light permission to motion capture their movements, were used as a basis for these avatars.
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“A lot of times when you’re trying to learn a choreography, it’s watching a YouTube video and you have to pause it, rewind, and play it,” Chen said. “If you were to have a virtual avatar dancing in front of you and correcting for any parts that you missed, it might be a lot easier.”
Interactive video games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance, and YouTube tutorials have been helping people improve their skills in private for years. But those games are mostly aimed at solo players. Unlike the new generation of immersive VR apps, they cannot simulate the mechanics or confidence required for partner dancing on a live dance floor.
The reality check
But this kind of app won’t work for every dancer.
“Everyone learns a little bit differently. And so unless you have a game that has lots of different ways of teaching, you’re going to have things that work for some people and don’t work for others,” said Ariana Katana, a trained contemporary dancer and dance content creator who’s active on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms. “Also, it’s hard to dance with a headset on.”
And then there’s the issue of not being able to physically feel a virtual partner’s hand or shoulder while dancing with them. Patrick Ascolese, the creator of Trip the Light, said the experience could become more tactile in the future. “Haptic suits and wearables will be coming, but I think we’re a little away from that,” he said.
Ascolese said even with their limitations, immersive tools like Trip the Light have immense potential as judgment-free training grounds — giving reluctant dancers the baseline confidence they need to eventually step onto the dance floor with real partners in the real world, including at weddings.
“Just like anything else, practice makes perfect,” said Ascolese. “So the more time you spend in VR with a virtual partner, it works towards helping you get over that social hurdle. We are teaching you the moves that you have to do in order to go out and have fun.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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