The Gold Tooth Standard: What You Can Buy With a Mouthful of Metal
Gold closed at yet another record high. People are now willing to pay $1852.20 per ounce of the gleaming metal. This means that even tiny amounts of gold are now worth quite a bit.
This got me thinking. What about gold teeth? I called up gold-buyer GoldFellow and asked their VP of marketing, Janis Rafkin, if she could weigh a gold tooth they'd recently gotten in. She was nice enough to comply and came back with a weight of three grams. Most gold teeth are only about 2/3 gold, so you figure it actually contains two grams of gold. That makes the theoretical value of such a gold bit on the world market $132. (For a lot of reasons, selling a tiny amount of gold will never fetch its world per-ounce price, but go with the hypothetical for a few minutes.)
Your mouth has 32 teeth, so imagine that you sold 32 gold teeth at the current world market price. You're looking at $4,234! Here's what you could buy or pay for with that amount of money.
- 8 base-model iPads ($499 each)
- 3.25 months of the average mortgage in America ($1295/month)
- 847 Shake Shack shakes ($5 each)
- 7 years of cell phone service for the average person ($600/year)
- 1 1999 Chevy Camaro ($3500)
- 33 terabytes of storage on Amazon S3 (approx $0.125 per GB)
The point here is that gold is worth a ridiculous amount of money. You can buy a lot in the real world for the tiny amount of gold contained in artificial teeth. That's one reason the gold buying business has taken off.