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A rare gold Bionicle Lego piece found at a Pennsylvania Goodwill is up for auction

The 14-karat gold Bionicle Golden Kanohi Hau Mask Lego piece was found at a Goodwill warehouse in State College.

A rare 14-karat gold Bionicle Golden Kanohi Hau Mask Lego piece was found at a Pennsylvania Goodwill warehouse. The piece is up for auction with bids in the thousands.
A rare 14-karat gold Bionicle Golden Kanohi Hau Mask Lego piece was found at a Pennsylvania Goodwill warehouse. The piece is up for auction with bids in the thousands.Read moreGoodwill/Staff Illustration
    by Emily Bloch
    Updated 
    Published 

This a Lego piece you definitely don’t want to misplace.

A rare Lego Bionicle mask made of 14-karat gold instead of plastic appeared at a Goodwill sorting warehouse in State College. Now, it’s up for auction and could earn thousands of dollars.

Lego began manufacturing mask pieces to go on its Bionicle series figures in the early 2000s. The Kanohi Hau Mask was one of them, made in an assortment of colors over the years.

The company also cast a select few of the masks in 14-karat gold, silver, and platinum. The exact number made is fuzzy, but legend has it that 30 gold pieces were created, with 25 going to the Bionicle team and five gifted to members of the public through contests and sweepstakes.

Over the years, a few of those 30 gold masks have resurfaced online or have re-sold. Now, one can be yours.

“We didn’t know what we had when we found it,” Goodwill Industries of North Central Pennsylvania spokesperson Jessica Illuzzi told WTAJ, the local CBS affiliate. “It came in a box full of random jewelry from the State College store. So it had already been processed through donations there.”

» READ MORE: Five amazing Lego builds at ‘The Art of the Brick’ exhibit’s return to the Franklin Institute

Goodwill listed the piece on its auction website, shopgoodwill.com, on Friday. The first bid was for $3,300. As of Tuesday morning, it had already surpassed $6,000 with nearly a dozen bids.

The piece is being sold in what appears to be an original Lego-branded jewelry box and weighs 26.14 grams according to a photo of it being weighed, an estimated $994 worth of gold.

It also marks the second time this specific mask has been up for auction.

In early February, Goodwill listed the piece and it racked up a winning bid of $33,000. When that winner backed out, the item was re-listed.

“I think it’s really cool that there’s so few of them, but it’s also kind of cool to find out the research behind it. And then the final step is to find the right collector,” Illuzzi told WTAJ.

The auction is set to end Wednesday at 9:09 p.m.