Whitby jet has been worked since at least 1500 BCE — Neolithic and Bronze Age jewellery made from Whitby jet has been found across Britain. Roman soldiers wore jet amulets. The Victorian mourning jewellery tradition — popularised by Queen Victoria after Prince Albert's death in 1861 — made Whitby jet the defining material of 40 years of royal mourning and established it as the colour of grief.

Lustrous, final, and elegantly mournful. Jet black has the depth of black with a slight warmth — the warmth of compressed wood, of something that was once alive. Associated with mourning, elegance, and the particular beauty of things that absorb rather than reflect. In fashion, jet-black jewellery signals sophisticated grief rather than the dramatic grief of other black materials.

Queen Victoria's 40-year mourning for Prince Albert (1861–1901) made Whitby jet the most culturally loaded material in Victorian Britain. The Whitby jet industry — employing hundreds of craftspeople in the small Yorkshire fishing town — was entirely sustained by mourning jewellery production. When Victoria died, the fashion for jet ended almost overnight. The phrase "jet black" entered the language from this material — one of the few colours named after a gemstone rather than a precious metal.