Ooh-La-Landmark! Teen builds Eiffel Tower out of 700K toothpicks.

You’ve seen plenty of headlines about teens spending too much time using their hands to hold up their phone instead of actually working with them. So the engineering nerds in us absolutely swooned when we stumbled across this story of a teenager who built a Guinness World Record Eiffel Tower replica… entirely out of toothpicks.

Teen Richard Plaud spent years constructing the replica, which stands more than 23 feet tall and reportedly used over 700,000 toothpicks held together with adhesive. The project was so intricate that it required detailed engineering calculations, structural planning and enough patience to make most adults quietly back away from the table.

Even better: this isn’t even his first world record.

Plaud previously earned recognition for another toothpick Eiffel Tower before eventually surpassing his own achievement with an even larger, more complex version. Which means the kid didn’t just wake up one day and accidentally become the world’s leading expert in tiny wooden Parisian infrastructure. This is apparently a lifestyle now.

Engineering brains tend to work that way. One project becomes a bigger project. Then a bigger challenge. Then suddenly someone is staring at 700,000 toothpicks thinking, “You know what? We can go taller.”

And while the story sounds whimsical on the surface, there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing younger generations dive headfirst into hands-on creativity again. At a time when so much life happens through screens, stories like this are a reminder that people still love building tangible things with their hands.

Granted, Hamilton tends to work with slightly heavier materials than toothpicks.

But the instinct is familiar.