Stars—they’re just like us! But are they, really? Sure, they eat, sleep, and fall in and out of love like the rest of us. And, by all accounts—perhaps Tom Cruise notwithstanding—we all appear to be aging in the same direction. But just because Britney Spears buys her own Grande latte on occasion, Ben Affleck will melt into the crowd of a Red Sox game, and Taylor Swift hits boutique exercise classes doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re anything like the rest of us.
Case in point: Have you ever gotten in a bidding war with Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio for some Mongolian dinosaur bones? Or wanted to wear your lover’s blood in a vial around your neck as a sign of your devotion? What about spending $1,168,000 annually on just your hair? If the answer’s “no,” then guess what?! You’re not like the stars! For all of the quirky and downright zany ways that celebrities distinguish themselves from normal people, read on.
01. They believe in leprechauns.
“I believe in all of these Irish myths, like leprechauns,” Megan Fox said in an interview with Esquire. “Not the pot of gold, not the Lucky Charms leprechauns. But maybe was there something in the traditional sense? I believe that this stuff came from somewhere other than people’s imaginations.”
02. They hire people to remove the cardboard sleeve from their coffee.
“I hate the sleeve on a Starbucks cup,” Kim Kardashian once admitted on her website, as spotted by StyleCaster. “I leave the room for someone to take it off for me because I cringe from the sound. It’s like nails on a chalkboard for me. I hate cardboard.”
03. They get into bidding wars over dinosaur skulls.
Who wants a Mongolian dinosaur skull more, Nicolas Cage or Leonardo DiCaprio? Turns out, it’s Cage, who, according to Vanity Fair, bested the Revenant star in a bidding war for the privilege of paying $276,000 for the world’s most expensive paperweight. Take that, Leo!
04. They feed their babies like birds.
On her health food site TheKindLife.com, Clueless star Alicia Silverstone posted a video of the surprising way she feeds her son, Bear. “I fed Bear the mochi and a tiny bit of veggies from the soup…from my mouth to his,” she wrote. “It’s his favorite…and mine.” To be fair: Some have claimed that pre-chewing food for an infant has health benefits, like boosting a baby’s immune system, and is the norm in many non-Western cultures.
05. They own solid gold bathtubs.
Among other outrageously poor money decisions too numerous to reveal here, Mike Tyson once reportedly dropped an estimated $2.2 million on a 24 karat gold bathtub for his mansion in Ohio.
06. They give each other tickets to outer space.
For Russell Brand’s 35th birthday, in 2010, his then-girlfriend Katy Perry bought him a $200,000 ticket on Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s suborbital spaceflight. “We are very excited to have him on board,” a rep for the company told E! News. Unfortunate for both of them, Virgin Galactic is still in test-flight mode years later.
07. They buy their children entire rooms of candy.
We’re not talking about a standard playroom, where kids can keep their toys and games. We mean a room devoted exclusively to candy. That’s what Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon created for their twins: a room that physically contains every type of candy they could possibly want, from gigantic lollipops to their very own cotton candy maker.
08. They have ghost-detecting machines.
Lady Gaga is afraid of some ghosts. Specifically, a ghost named Ryan that she’s pretty sure is haunting her. So she spent a whopping $50,000 on an electromagnetic field meter designed to detect poltergeists.
09. They have a fly species named after them.
The Grammys weren’t enough for Beyoncé, who now gets an insect named after her. It happened in 2012, when researchers in Northern Queensland, Australia, discovered a new species of horse fly. So they named it “Scaptia beyonceae,” apparently because of the golden hairs on the fly’s abdomen. Researchers even claimed that the rare horse fly is the “all-time diva of flies.”
10. They rent out entire theaters to watch a movie.
As rapper/actor Ludacris admitted in a 2016 Instagram post, “Sometimes you have to rent the entire movie theater out for your fam and babies to yell and disrupt the movie in peace #nowthatsludicrous.” Sure, knock yourself out. It’s like how we leave a jacket on the chair next to us in the movie theater so nobody sits down and… okay, never mind, it’s nothing like that.
11. They wear necklaces filled with each other’s blood.
When Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton were still a couple, there were rumors of their vampiric tendencies. And recently Thornton confirmed it, explaining that Jolie “thought it would be interesting and romantic if we took a little razorblade and sliced our fingers, smeared a little blood on these lockets and you wear it around your neck just like you wear your son or daughter’s baby hair in one.”
12. They have their own fire department.
George Lucas owns his own fire truck and employs 14 full-time firefighters. But hey: If you created Star Wars, we guess it’s okay to buy anything you want.
13. They’ll buy plane tickets for their hats.
When U2 lead singer and activist Bono arrived in Italy for a charity concert in 2003 and realized he left his favorite hat, a black trilby, back in London, he did what any reasonable person would do. He did the concert without the hat. Ha, no, just kidding! According to a profile in The Telegraph, he paid $1,200 for the hat to be flown to him, on a first class seat on British Airways. Because obviously Bono’s hat needs more legroom than you.
14. They think an octopus and two cobras sound like great pets.
Is there anything we could add to make this sound more ridiculous? Yes, as CNBC reported, Nicolas Cage one dropped a cool $150,000 on a pet octopus He also reportedly owned two Albino King Cobra snakes as pets. He also bought an antidote, since King Cobras are an especially venomous species of snake and he didn’t want to die immediately if he ever got bit. He eventually gave them to a zoo.
15. Their bodies are haunted.
Pop singer Kesha claimed she was “very serious” when explaining her haunted body to talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in 2013. “It’s a problem,” she explained. “I was told I had dead people in me so I called my hypnotherapist. So then she said she had to exorcise my body. And then I got a ghost meter to read it, just beeped at my [privates].”
16. They insure their body parts.
Rihanna’s legs are both insured for an alleged $1 million. But that’s nothing compared to Julia Robert’s smile, which is reportedly insured for a staggering $30 million. Also: Dolly Parton’s breasts are insured for $600,000, while Kylie Minogue’s butt is insured for $5 million.
17. They spend a lot of money on humidifiers
You can buy a basic humidifier for around $20. But pop diva Celine Dion insisted on getting one that cost $2 million. That’s a $1,999,980 markup. Sure, she made the investment while in Las Vegas—during a three-year residency—and she definitely needed to protect her vocal cords from the dry desert air. But there’s no reason a device that puts moisture in the air should cost more than a Manhattan condo.
18. They buy entire towns.
Why buy just one house when you can own the entire town? That was Kim Basinger’s reasoning in 1989, when, as originally reported in the New York Times, she decided to spend $20 million cash to buy Braselton, Georgia, a 2,000-acre town with around 7,500 residents. Her original idea was to make it a tourist destination, with movie studios and a film festival. But just five years later, she let it go for just $1 million.
19. They spend millions on their hair.
How much would you guess Rihanna spends every year on making sure her hair is super pretty? If you guessed “more than four years at Harvard,” you would be totally right! The exact annual price tag is $1,168,000, according to sources close to the pop star.
20. They think their creativity can be stolen sexually.
Oh, Lady Gaga. “I’m quite celibate now,” she once revealed in a Vanity Fair cover story. “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me.”
21. They see a taxidermied pony and think, “I need that.”
Actress Amanda Seyfried didn’t go to Britain looking for a taxidermied miniature horse named Antoine. She was there for the British premiere of her movie Red Riding Hood. But she wandered into a taxidermist and saw the dead miniature horse, which was indeed named Antoine, and said, “I’ll take it.” The horse was shipped back to the States to live with Seyfried’s other companion, an Australian shepherd named Finn. “It’s going to be Finn’s new best friend,” she said. “Unless he tries to eat it.”
22. They’re willing to pay people for very strange things.
You don’t become a successful rapper like Waka Flocka Flame by doing all your own grunt work. So in 2014, he put out an ad for a personal “blunt roller,” offering an annual salary of $50,000 for basically just rolling joints for Flame.
23. They run diamond mines.
You get some extra cash, like global R&B sensation Akon, and you want to invest it somewhere. Why not a diamond mine in South Africa? Akon hasn’t explained much about his mine, other than that it’s “complicated,” but there’s got to be an easier way to get some bling.
24. They believe that hip-hop is controlled by a “gay mafia.”
“The hip-hop community is most likely owned by gay, to be honest with you,” Fat Joe once said. “They’re owned by gay.” If you’re confused why he’s using “gay” as a noun, he elaborated: “I happen to think there’s a gay mafia in hip-hop. Not rappers. You know, the editorial presidents of magazines, the PDs at radio stations, the people who give you awards at award shows. This is a… gay mafia, my man.”
25. They’ve slept with ghosts.
“Some sort of spirit came down from God knows where and made love to me,” said Charlie’s Angels actress Lucy Liu in an Us Weekly interview from 1999. “It was sheer bliss. I felt everything. And then he floated away.”
26. They wear a mink coats made of polar bear.
While visiting New York in July before his big fight with Floyd Mayweather, Conor McGregor arrived for a press conference wearing a white fur coat that he claimed was made of polar bear fur. “I’m a cold [expletive],” he elaborated, and explained that he doesn’t care how boiling hot New York is in the middle of July.
27. When they buy a toy car for their kids, it’s covered in diamonds.
When rapper The Game invests in a remote control Bentley GT for his son, he wants something special. Like, say, a car with the entire exterior covered in diamonds. As he explained on his Instagram, the toy is decorated with “almost $100,000 in diamonds… $98,376 dollars if we gettin technical.” That’s a lot of diamonds.