dear asking for a friend,
i take daily showers and consider myself pretty clean, but i recently noticed some brown buildup inside my navel. scrubbing the area with a loofah and a body wash doesn’t seem to help, and when i rubbed it, it quickly turned red. what is this stuff and how can i safely remove it?
signed, crop top
dear crop top,
just like the rest of the body, your belly button needs a good scrubbing: our navels can be magnets for all sorts of gross junk that you’ve never even heard of.
north carolina-based
researchers
swabbed the belly buttons of 60 study participants and uncovered some pretty disturbing stuff. a total of 2,368 species of bacteria was found inside the participants’ navels, with more than half of the identified bacteria being “completely new to science,” according to an independent
report
.
one participant’s belly button had “a bacterium that had previously been found only in soil from japan” – where he has never traveled – while two types of “extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents” were identified in someone else’s navel.
the truth is that because our midriffs aren’t usually exposed, our navels don’t get a lot of airflow. so in addition to bacteria, belly buttons can attract and harbour lint, dirt, dead skin cells, and sweat as well as soap residue.