Why Do We Wear Teeth? The Strange History of Tooth Jewelry

Teeth are tiny, personal, slightly creepy, and somehow impossible to throw away. We grow them inside our bodies. Lose them. Save them in envelopes and tiny boxes. Put them under pillows for imaginary creatures to collect in the night. Some of us apparently keep them for decades until we eventually decide to cast them in silver and wrap them around people's fingers. Maybe that last part is just me.

Victorian milk tooth ring in 19K gold and diamonds

I've been making tooth jewelry for years, and a lot of it started with my own saved baby teeth. I couldn't throw them away. They were these weird little remnants of a body I used to have. Tiny pieces of childhood that had actually fallen out of me. Naturally, I made jewelry out of them.

My tooth collection is on my sister jewelry site of costume jewelry, but, if something appeals to you, just send me a note
I can make anything you see in gold and diamond encrusted. Might I suggest a Gold Tooth Ring set with champagne diamonds in the one gold tooth? 

So if you've ever looked at a tooth ring and thought, who the hell decided this was jewelry? Pull up a chair. We need to talk about our ancestors.

Tooth jewelry is much older than the Victorians

The Victorians get blamed for a lot of delightfully morbid behavior, but they did not invent the idea of hanging teeth from our bodies.

Archaeologists have found tooth ornaments going back thousands of years. Upper Paleolithic sites have yielded animal teeth that were perforated, worn and polished from long use, suggesting they weren't just random bits of bone with holes in them. People actually wore these things.

And sometimes the teeth were human.

At the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in what is now Turkey, researchers studied human teeth that had been deliberately drilled and used as pendants. The confirmed examples came from adults and appear to have been worn after the individuals had died. Whatever exactly they meant to the people wearing them is lost to us, but they clearly meant enough to be carefully altered, strung and kept close to the body.

Animal teeth had their own lives as jewelry, too. Fifth-century B.C. Etruscan pendants in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection include animal teeth mounted in gold. The teeth were believed to have protective, talismanic power.

Which makes sense to me. A tooth is already an incredible object before anybody puts gold around it. It's hard. Personal. Slightly dangerous. It survives long after softer parts of a body disappear.I t's basically nature's jewelry component.

Then the Victorians got involved

And this is where things get wonderfully sentimental. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, jewelry containing pieces of the body became an established way of remembering people. Hair was especially common. It was braided, woven and placed under glass in rings, lockets and brooches as a physical connection to someone living or dead. The Met has mourning jewelry from the period containing actual human hair, sometimes paired with names, death dates, coffins, skeletons and other memento mori imagery.

Teeth belonged to this same strange, intimate world. And because history occasionally gives us gifts, Queen Victoria herself was into it.

In 1847, the first milk tooth lost by her eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, was set into an enamelled gold thistle brooch. Later, a gold-and-enamel fuchsia pendant and matching earrings were created using the milk teeth of Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice. These pieces remain in the Royal Collection.

So yes. Queen Victoria wore her children's teeth. Royal jewelry. But make it dental.

Baby tooth jewelry wasn't necessarily about death

This is one of the things I find most interesting about Victorian tooth jewelry. It's easy for us to see a hundred-year-old piece of jewelry containing a human tooth and immediately think: MOURNING. DEATH. PROBABLY A GHOST. And sometimes, yes. But not always.

Human remains were used in mourning jewelry, and teeth could absolutely become memorial objects. But baby teeth also commemorated life: childhood, growth and the strange little milestones parents desperately want to freeze before they're gone. The British Dental Journal notes examples of infant teeth used in nineteenth-century jewelry and describes Queen Victoria's use of her daughter's first milk tooth as a commemorative object. Which makes the whole thing feel a lot less foreign.

People still save baby teeth. We just tend to hide them in the back of a drawer instead of handing them to a jeweler and saying, "Can you put this in gold?" The Victorians had better follow-through.

Why are teeth such powerful keepsakes?

I think part of the fascination is that teeth occupy a very strange category. They're part of us. And then suddenly they're not.

A baby tooth marks a physical transition. It belonged to a version of you that no longer exists. You lose it because you're growing, but the thing itself remains almost unchanged. That's weirdly beautiful.

Teeth also carry a lot of contradictory associations. A smile can be welcoming, seductive, nervous or threatening. We bare our teeth when we're happy. Animals bare them when they want you to fuck off. They're symbols of vulnerability and weapons at the same time.

And unlike a photograph or a lock of hair, a tooth has weight. Shape. Roots. Damage. History written directly into it. It's an object, but it's also evidence.

You were here. You grew this. This belonged to a body.

No wonder humans keep hanging onto them.

My own tooth problem

I didn't start making tooth jewelry because I knew any of this history. I just had my baby teeth.

Eventually those teeth became the source for my Tooth Ring. I made castings of my actual baby teeth and turned them into a circle of sterling silver teeth that wraps around the finger. The teeth in the jewelry aren't human teeth themselves—they're metal descendants of mine.

And then things escalated.

The original Gold Tooth Ring was something I made as a wedding band for my husband: a row of teeth cast from my own baby teeth with one little gold tooth interrupting the pattern. Later came the Gold Tooth Bracelet, made from those same childhood relics, now multiplied into a row of teeth with a single gold one buried among them.

I love the transformation of it. Something that would normally sit forgotten in a box becomes permanent. Heavy. Wearable. The biological leftover becomes an object again.

Tooth jewelry lives somewhere between sentimental and unsettling

That's probably why I keep coming back to teeth. They're creepy, but they're not just creepy. They're sentimental without being sweet about it.

There's memory in them. Loss. Growth. Bodies changing. Childhood disappearing. Maybe even a little mortality hanging around the edges. You don't need to know any of that to wear a tooth ring, of course. Maybe you just think teeth look cool.

But I think there's a reason this particular object keeps showing up in jewelry across wildly different places and periods of human history.

We're collectors. Especially of things we aren't quite ready to lose. Sometimes that's a lock of hair. Sometimes it's a photograph. Sometimes it's a tiny incisor sitting in an envelope for thirty years until somebody gets the bright idea to make a ring out of it.

Is tooth jewelry the same as mourning jewelry?

Not necessarily. Mourning jewelry is specifically made to remember someone who has died. Teeth, hair and other physical remains have all been incorporated into mourning pieces, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But tooth jewelry has also been made for protection, personal adornment, commemoration and sentiment. Queen Victoria's baby-tooth jewelry, for example, marked events in her children's lives rather than their deaths. Context matters. A tooth can be a memorial. Or it can be, as it was for me and my husband, a marker of lifelong devotion.

What does tooth jewelry symbolize?

There isn't one universal meaning. Across history, teeth have been worn as protective objects, personal ornaments, sentimental keepsakes and memorials. Their meaning changes depending on who made them, who wore them and why.

For me, they're about transformation. They mark the passage from one body into another. A tiny relic of who you were, carried forward instead of discarded. They're slightly disgusting, strangely sentimental, and very, very human.

Want to wear some teeth?

You can look through the Sweet Tooth Collection on my sister jewelry site, Anomaly Jewelry where I offer costume jewelry and see what calls to you. Rings, bracelets, teeth, tiny impostor baby heads and other objects that might concern a more ordinary jewelry company. Anything you see there can be custome made for you in any karat gold with however many diamonds or emeralds you desire. Just send me a not here and we can work on your custom tooth ring. I'm happy to set your child's teeth or recreate on in platinum. Your choice!  Lets make a custom keepsake together!!!

Wear the weird. Keep the relics.

—Karen