Gold Tooth Donation Worth $100 Lands in Arizona Red Kettle

I read a recent news article by Melissa Busch about a quirky donation made to a Salvation Army Red Kettle in Arizona. Every year, you can always count on the familiar Big Red Kettle outside retail shops with someone happily ringing a little holiday bell reminding every one of us about the Salvation Army’s support of those in need. 

Well, for the second time in recent years, a gold tooth was donated into the Red Kettle!  This may sound weird, a bit gross, and a curious choice for a donation. However, when you consider how much gold is now and the fact that the person donating it obviously did not have a use for the tooth anymore, it makes sense! The gold tooth could be worth about $100 which is a pretty generous donation. A few years ago, the same site received an even bigger and heavier gold tooth worth about $300.  I wonder if it is the same person making these donations, and whether it is a dental patient or dentist putting these “retired gold teeth” into the kettle?  Hopefully for that Santa ringing the bell, the tooth was cleaned properly!

Gold crowns were once used frequently, as they tended to closely mimic the physical properties of teeth, and held up so well to the continuous wear and tear of chewing, grinding, and eating over time. However, they are not used very frequently anymore due to cost, and have been replaced by newer technology: ceramic porcelain crowns, a technology that continues to get better over time.  Ceramic and porcelain crowns have become extremely durable and strong, and obviously better mimic the tooth-colored aesthetic properties of natural teeth.  

Everybody in the past few years is familiar with the problems of inflation and rising prices. It makes sense to also include the price of gold in that equation of rising costs.  When I graduated from dental school 20 years ago, the average price of gold – in 2005 –  was $445 per ounce. The price of gold hit an all time high last month at $4379 per ounce. That’s about an 800% gain, which translates to an extraordinary cost for making a gold crown these days.  Dentistry in this country is already prohibitively expensive for many, and if we were still doing gold restorations for people, very few of them would be able to afford any extensive dental work. Luckily for all of us, over the past 20 years, the rising cost of gold has run parallel to the increasingly excellent technology of ceramic alternatives.

Most people put coins or small amounts of cash in the Red Kettle every year, but there are sometimes unique donations. One donation recently was a diamond ring glued to a dollar bill. That donation even one upped the gold tooth! The world still does have generous – and very unique – people.