cut your teeth

I'm supposed to be writing a paper on Neopythagoreanism right now (I got an extension) but I don't feel like it. I can't find a copy of Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras and the only copy of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana is locked up in the (currently closed) classics library. Lame. I have 16 or so hours before it's due, so on to better things: Tooth Jewelry. No, this doesn't mean grills or having sapphires implanted into your cainines. This is more of a ... making jewelry out of your cainines situation. Observe:

Set of false teeth glued to a metal strip. Decidedly the creepiest of the lot. Available at this etsy shop.

Okay, easily my favorite of the bunch. Erica Weiner got ahold of some partial bridges from the 1910s and 20s and made pins out of them. I only wish I had known about them sooner. Don't know if they're real or false, and don't care. They look like beetles and I can't help but be reminded of Patrick Bateman's Halloween costume, part of which involved Victoria Bell's finger bone fashioned into a buttonier. Erica Weiner has a blog where some of her one-off pieces are featured and go onto her etsy page rather than being sold through her main website.

Victorian tooth jewelry from Loved to Death. They have brooches, rings, earrings, and necklaces. The settings are a little too ornate for my taste. Plus, jewelry in this style has a tendency to look a little Hot Topic-y and cheaply made.

You have to wonder, where are they getting these teeth from? My initial instinct is to say China, because, as we all know, everything comes from China. However, I prefer to think that they are scavenged by a group of industrious young children as part of a tooth fairy money scam in order that they might finance the purchase of a Sega Dreamcast, but that's just me.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is work by Polly Van der Glas, an artist from Australia whose work is featured on the National Association for the Visual Arts [of Australia] website. The settings on these are maybe a tad industrial-design for me, but I do like the knuckle-duster.

However, if you want to puss out, there are many metal options:

These pieces are by an artist named Claire Johnston whose Tooth Fairy series began after her daughter began to lose her baby teeth. Apparently, like Loved to Death, she was inspired by Victorian Mourning Jewelry but thankfully refrained from using settings that make them look so tiresomely goth. She also has a blog.

The obligatory Pamela Love and Alex & Chloe versions, available at Oak and Kabiri respectively:

Neither of these looks right to me. The Pamela Love tooth is too stylized and the Alex & Chole too idealized. Besides, when they're rendered in gold it takes all of the transgressive power out of it and they become non-threatening and cartoonish and boring.

One of the reasons I'm attracted to tooth jewelry, besides the obvious creepiness factor, is that using my own wisdom teeth would be creating something uniquely mine. Granted, other people have tooth jewelry, but as it would be my tooth it wouldn't matter. I love to look at jewelry, but I often feel uncomfortable in jewelry made by strangers. Almost all of my jewelry is pieces my father made decades ago for my mother or for himself, so I feel some connection to them. It feels almost wrong to wear mass-marketed jewelry, much as I may ogle it inappropriately.

sources: etsy, nava.net.au, google images, oak, kabiri