Everything I Own That’s Worth Its Weight in Gold

By Nicole Dieker October 17, 2018

I was squeezing the final drops of product out of my 1.4 oz tube of Neutrogena Healthy Skin Anti-Wrinkle Cream with Sunscreen — which I’ve been using since I was in my early 20s, thanks to an older friend who advised me that the earlier you started using wrinkle cream, the fewer wrinkles you got — and my constant internal monologue yapped out something along the lines of make sure you get everything out of the bottle, this stuff is worth its weight in gold.

As disappointed as I was to learn that my internal monologue apparently favors cliches, it made me curious: was my $15 bottle of anti-wrinkle cream actually worth its weight in gold? At $10.71 per ounce, it was probably the most expensive product by weight I owned — of course, now my internal monologue is haranguing me to go weigh my sofa and do the math on that, so… okay, the Furniture Row website claims my Tahoe Sofa weighs 116 lbs, which is 1,856 ounces, and since I paid $299 for the sofa (thanks, Billfold archives!) that means my sofa comes in at 16 cents per ounce.

I’m not going to figure out the price per ounce of the rest of the stuff in my home. I am going to look up the current price per ounce of gold.

(Also: before you ask, no my wrinkle cream is not measured in fluid ounces.)

According to MoneyMetals.com, gold currently sells for $1,226.15 per ounce. It is significantly more expensive than my wrinkle cream. I am pretty sure that nothing I own is worth its weight in gold, not even my actual gold. (I suspect my gold earrings and necklace charms are gold-plated at best and gold-colored at worst.)

MoneyMetals.com lists the current weight of silver at $14.71 per ounce, which means that my wrinkle cream is not quite worth its weight in silver.

I also know from high school science class that a nickel weighs 5 grams, which means that an ounce of nickels comes out to just over 25 cents. This means that my sofa isn’t worth its weight in nickels, which I find kind of hilarious.

Also, now I have to figure out how large 116 lbs of nickels would be. At five nickels to an ounce and .077 inches to the width of a nickel, that’d be a pile of 9,280 nickels (worth $464) stacked 59-and-a-half feet high. Of course, nobody would make a single 59-and-a-half-foot stack of nickels. They’d make 12 just-under-five-foot stacks of nickels, which — if we assume they arranged the stacks in a 3×4 pattern and get Google to remind us that a nickel is .835 inches in diameter — would be 2.5 inches by 3.3 inches.

Check my math. I dare you.

I was going to end the post there, but then I remembered one more valuable item worth evaluating. My 13-inch MacBook Air weighs 2.96 lbs (47.36 oz) and cost me $1,495.86 including the AppleCare subscription. That means my MacBook Air is worth $31.58 per ounce, which makes it more valuable than both my wrinkle cream and silver, but still not worth its weight in gold.

Of course, I use this MacBook for all of my money-earning activities, so if you count my 2018 estimated adjusted gross income of $60,557 per year and divide that by 47.36 ounces, you get $1,278.65 per ounce, which means I FINALLY HAVE ONE ITEM THAT IS WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD, THANK YOU.

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