Baby Teeth Jewelry Is Actually, Like, A Thing. So You Know.

A confession: we recently got new bedroom furniture and when I moved the old bed and side table to make way for the new, I found a mouthful of baby teeth stashed in a grip of plastic baggies.

Let me explain.

The tooth fairy is a straight no-go for Lila. Like, for real, Little Girlpie refuses to put teeth under her pillow because, wait for it… she doesn’t want “a stranger” running up into her room, messing with her pillow, taking things that don’t belong to her and leaving dirty money on the sheets.

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Thing is, Lila still believes in the tooth fairy. So ever since she lost her two front teeth at age 5—within a week of each other, her big sister knocked out the one and she lost the other one brawling out on the soccer field—she’s been putting her dropped toofuses in my hand so that I can put them under my pillow for the tooth fairy. Right.

Not gonna front: it makes the tooth fairy’s job way easier. She’s great at leaving cash without waking me up, but she isn’t at all good at tooth disposal. She keeps shoving the teeth between the headboard and the mattress, so… yeah.

Now, I was at a loss for what to do with this newfound collection of baby teeth. At a loss, that is, until I saw this story about “Baby Teeth Jewelry” on Good Morning America.

Yeah, girl, you read that right: Baby. Teeth. Jewelry.

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GMA caught the convo first on BabyCenter, where, apparently, moms across the land are parsing what it means to be so obsessed over preserving memories of their babies that they’re having their kids’ baby teeth dipped in gold and silver and then attached to chains. One jewelry maker, Jackie Kaufman, owner of the Rock My World shop on Etsy, told GMA she’s got about 100 orders from people looking for custom teeth jewelry. (Side note: Jackie’s fingerprint jewelry is kinda the business.) “I think you have to hold a special place in your heart for the teeth, and not everyone will feel this way,” Kaufman told GMA. “You are either repulsed by it or love it.”

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Not that sterling silver-dipped baby teeth are repulsive. Nowhere near as repulsive as saving, say, a newborn’s “boo boo belly”—that was our name for the piece of umbilical chord that drops off a baby’s navel—or a baggie full of hair from your baby’s first haircut, or the nutrient-rich placenta some moms are eating after they give birth.

For the record, I’ve done none of these things. And yet, somehow, I got eight bloody baby teeth in baggies, and I can’t bring myself to toss them in the trash.

A statement baby teeth necklace or nah?