Pearly-clutchers

Chantel Tattoli on why jewelry made from teeth isn’t only a thing of the past.

Not so long ago, Lindsy Parrott, the director of the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, in Queens, told me she’d like to have her son’s baby teeth mounted like gemstones—for jewelry. She was referencing milk tooth (baby tooth) jewelry, one of a number of crazes credited to Queen Victoria, who favored super sentimental bijoux.

“Victoria gets too much credit,” Beatrice Temperley, a Seattle-based vintage porn model (she poses exclusively in vintage and antique clothing, hosiery and accessories), who also responds to “the Tooth Fairy,” told me. Milk tooth jewelry was popular through the Victorian and Edwardian eras and not uncommon in the Art Deco epoch, but it had been a thing well before the English queen’s time. Temperley’s oldest piece dates to 1750.

Temperley, who is 29, acquired her first piece from a local antique shop when she was 14. The gold ring with wee teeth worked into an acorn design was described to her as “creepy.”

“I don’t think it’s creepy,” Temperley had replied. “Somebody was very loved.”

Temperley believes that she now owns the world’s largest collection of antique milk tooth jewelry—some 500 pieces. She buys thousands of dollars of examples of it each month (and pays for it all with income earned through OnlyFans). When we spoke in July, she was waiting for a turn-of-the-century tooth-encrusted bracelet—“like a mouth”—to arrive in the mail.

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