Navel gazing

From time to time I notice that I have lint in my belly button.  I've always presumed it somehow got there from my clothes and I may have even considered collecting it at some point (never got around to it).  Fortunately for me others have also wondered this (and collected it!).

The general consensus seems to be that the lint is "an accumulation of cloth fibers that are scraped by body hair".  It also contains dust, fat, protein and sweat!  Believe it or not some scientists have done studies on this subject and have found that hair around the navel seems to correlate with more lint, although there were still a few hair free women that ended up with some.  This explains why it seems to affect men more than women, maybe also because men are more willing to talk about it!  The theory is that the hair around the belly button scrapes off clothing fibers and channels the lint to the belly button.

The colour of the lint tends to correlate with the colour of the clothing the person is wearing, with a common bluish-grey colour being the average of the colours of most clothes.  This is similar to what you would see with dryer lint.  Apparently belly button piercings seem to be effective at combating the lint.  There is also an alternative explanation.

My favourite part of looking into this was reading the website of the Guinness world record holder for the biggest collection of navel lint.  It's an amusing read and some of the comments he's received are quite funny as well.  He's been collecting his own lint since 1984 with an average of 3.03 milligrams per day.