Standard insurance is boring. Home, car, life — you know the drill. But somewhere between "sensible financial product" and "absolute fever dream" lies a category of policies that exist, are legally binding, and have been written in complete seriousness by people in suits. Most of them pass through Lloyd's of London, which has had three hundred years to develop a remarkable tolerance for unusual requests. Here are eight of the strangest.
1. Lloyd's of London will insure almost anything — and has been doing so since 1688
Before we get to the good stuff, a quick primer. Lloyd's of London is not a single insurance company — it is a specialist insurance marketplace where competing syndicates of underwriters take on risks that mainstream insurers won't touch. It started in Edward Lloyd's coffee house in the late seventeenth century, insuring ships. It expanded from there. When you read that a celebrity "insured their legs with Lloyd's," what that means is that someone walked into this ancient, very serious institution and made a case that the risk was quantifiable and worth pricing. Apparently, it usually is.
2. A coffee taster reportedly insured his taste buds for £10 million
Gennaro Pelliccia, master coffee taster for Costa Coffee, reportedly took out a policy through Lloyd's covering his tongue and taste buds for around £10 million. This sounds absurd until you consider that Pelliccia's palate is the quality-control mechanism for one of the UK's largest coffee chains. If his taste changes — from illness, injury, or just an unfortunate encounter with a very aggressive curry — the company has a problem. Insuring a professional sense organ is, in that context, basically just sensible business continuity planning. Extremely expensive, extremely specific sensible business continuity planning.
3. Bruce Springsteen's voice and David Beckham's legs are reportedly covered
Celebrity body-part insurance is practically its own sub-genre. Bruce Springsteen reportedly insured his voice — reasonable for someone whose entire career depends on it holding up through three-hour concerts. David Beckham's legs were reportedly insured for a very large sum, as were the legs of numerous other top-flight footballers whose earning potential is quite literally tied to what's below the knee. This is actually fairly standard practice in professional sport: the body part is the asset, and insuring an asset is not controversial. It's just unusual when the asset can order its own drinks.
4. Troy Polamalu's hair was reportedly insured for $1 million — by a shampoo brand
Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu was famous for his extraordinarily long, thick hair, which became as much a part of his public identity as his football. Head & Shoulders, which used him in advertising, reportedly insured his hair through Lloyd's for $1 million. To be clear: a shampoo company insured a football player's hair against damage, because the hair was doing marketing work. The hair had a job. The hair had better insurance than most humans. This is fine.
Reported celebrity policies don't stop at Pelliccia, Springsteen, Beckham, and Polamalu. Mariah Carey's voice, Heidi Klum's legs, Dolly Parton's chest, and Jennifer Lopez's posterior have all reportedly featured in outsized insurance valuations over the years. Treat all specific figures as "reportedly" — the policies are real, the exact numbers are often publicist-adjacent — but the general principle is straightforward: if a specific body part is your primary commercial asset, someone will write you a policy on it.
5. Alien abduction insurance is a real product with tens of thousands of customers
The St. Lawrence Agency in Florida has reportedly sold tens of thousands of alien abduction insurance policies. The policies pay out in the event that the holder is taken by extraterrestrials. The proof requirements are, as you might expect, somewhat demanding — documentation signed by an official of the abducting alien species is understood to be required. The policies are priced accordingly cheap, because the expected payout is very low, for reasons the actuaries presumably had to think carefully about only once. The product exists, is sold in good faith, and has genuine customers who presumably sleep easier for it.
6. A whisky brand insured itself against having to pay out for the Loch Ness Monster
In the 1970s, a Scotch whisky company offered a cash prize — reportedly around £1 million — to anyone who could capture the Loch Ness Monster. A sensible marketing stunt, with one problem: if Nessie turned out to be real and someone actually caught her, they'd have to pay. The solution was to take out an insurance policy through Lloyd's covering the prize. Lloyd's, apparently concluding that the actuarial risk of a prehistoric plesiosaur turning up in a Scottish loch was manageable, wrote the policy. The monster remains at large. The claim has not been made.
7. Food critics and professional palates fall into a whole category of their own
Pelliccia's coffee-tasting tongue is not an isolated case. Professional tasters — tea, wine, whisky, olive oil, chocolate — work in industries where a single experienced palate can be worth millions in quality control, brand consistency, and competitive differentiation. The broader insurance principle here is straightforward: any well-defined, economically significant risk can be priced. A sommelier's nose, a perfumer's sense of smell, a pianist's hands — these are all insurable because the risk is specific, the economic consequence of loss is calculable, and a premium can be set accordingly. Strange-seeming from the outside; entirely logical from the underwriter's desk.
8. The point isn't weirdness — it's that any defined risk has a price
Taken together, these policies illustrate something genuinely interesting about how insurance works. The product is not really about what is being insured — it's about whether the risk is identifiable, measurable, and worth pricing. A taste bud policy and a home contents policy are the same thing at the structural level: one party agrees to bear a financial consequence that another party wants to transfer. Lloyd's has spent three centuries getting comfortable with that concept applied to increasingly unusual inputs. The alien abduction policy is the logical endpoint of a very old idea, just taken somewhere its inventors probably didn't anticipate.
Sources & further reading
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