The Most Expensive Teeth Ever Sold

In 2011 a Canadian dentist paid $36,857 for a decayed molar in a small auction room in Stockport.

It had been sitting in a housekeeper’s drawer for forty years. It still holds the world record.

£11,000 — Napoleon’s upper right canine

Pulled on St Helena in 1817, during the exile, by his own physician Barry O’Meara. Napoleon had been diagnosed with scurvy. The tooth came with paperwork tracing it back to the man who removed it.

It sold at Dominic Winter auctioneers in Wiltshire in 2005 for £11,000 — a little under £13,000 once the auction house took its cut. An anonymous English collector bought it.

For six years it was the most expensive tooth in the world.

£15,200 — Churchill’s dentures

Not a real tooth, but the best story on the list.

Churchill had a lisp and hated it, and his dental technician Derek Cudlipp built him a partial denture that deliberately preserved it. The point wasn’t a perfect mouth. It was that the voice on the radio had to stay the voice people already knew.

Cudlipp’s son Nigel put a set up for sale in 2010 at Keys in Aylsham, Norfolk. Estimated at around £5,000, it went for £15,200 — triple, to an anonymous bidder.

It holds the Guinness record for the most expensive false teeth ever sold.

$36,857 — John Lennon’s molar

Some time in the late 1960s Lennon had a bad molar out and handed it to his housekeeper, Dot Jarlett. Her daughter was a Beatles fan. He suggested she keep it as a souvenir.

The family kept it for four decades. In November 2011 it went to Omega Auctions in Stockport and sold for £19,500 — £23,010 with commission, about $36,857.

The buyer was Dr Michael Zuk, a dentist from Alberta, and he was extremely open about the plan: extract the DNA and, eventually, clone John Lennon.

That part didn’t happen. The tooth turned out to be too degraded to give up usable DNA. It remains, per Guinness World Records, the most expensive tooth ever sold at auction.

£730 — Isaac Newton’s, and why it might be the real winner

In 1816 a tooth said to be Newton’s was sold in London for £730. An aristocrat bought it and had it set into a ring, which he then wore.

£730 sounds like nothing next to Lennon. Adjust it for two centuries of inflation and it comes out around £62,000, roughly $81,000 — comfortably more than anything since.

That’s why you’ll see both claimed as the record. Lennon holds it in cash. Newton holds it in real money.

The one that has never been for sale

A left upper canine, said to be the Buddha’s, smuggled out of India in the fourth century hidden in the hair of a princess.

In Sri Lanka it stopped being a relic and became a credential. Whoever held the tooth held the right to rule the island — so kings went to war for it, moved it when capitals fell, and lost their legitimacy along with it. An invading army carried it back to India in 1283 and it had to be retrieved. The Portuguese seized what they said was the tooth in the sixteenth century and burned it in Goa; Sri Lanka’s position is that they burned a replica.

It sits in Kandy now, in a temple built inside a royal palace, which was the whole point.

No auction house has ever put a number on it.

Yours are worth $5.84

That’s the 2026 average payout in Delta Dental’s annual tooth fairy poll, taken from a thousand American parents of children between six and twelve.

A first tooth does better — $7.17, because the first one is an occasion.

Lennon’s molar was decayed, cracked and unusable for the one thing its buyer wanted it for. It went for roughly six thousand times the going rate.