Where Should Your Navel Go?

And does anyone have a choice?

Okay wow there’s a lot going on here. First of all, the Annals of Improbable Research people own improbable.com, where they catalog weird research—they’re also the folks who give out the Ig Nobel prizes every year, she said casually as if that were a remotely okay thing to reference with no context. They also put out a bimonthly magazine (which I just subscribed to and so can you; you can also buy back issues).

Today’s big news in the wide world of weird is an actual scientific study to figure out what the “ideal” place for a belly button is.

The aim of this study is to analyze the navel position and shape of the worldwide top model/celebrities recognized as top 2013 bikini models to determine references for ideal navel shape and positioning and to find potential clinical translation.

CLINICAL TRANSLATION????? Okay it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Enter abdominoplasty AKA the Tummy Tuck. I realize that there are people who get this procedure done because they have to because maybe they’ve lost a lot of weight or had a terrible disfiguring accident, but some people electively relocate body parts onto different parts of their bodies (see: Brazilian Butt Lift)!!!! You just know there’s a girl out there who’s like “Ugh, my belly button is WEIRDLY HIGH on my stomach so I look weird in a bikini,” and now she’s going to think she can just Mr. Potato Head her way into happiness if the belly-button equivalent of Dr. Miami gets a jump on this.

Anyway, I’m not going to go into detail here about how they conducted the study or what the results were (“somewhere in the middle part of your belly but like slightly lower down towards your hips”) because this is completely absurd, and also you can do that yourself. Suffice it to say that the navel hasn’t gotten this much attention since The Great Taylor Swift Belly Button Controversy of 2014–15. Mostly it’s dumb because there’s no “supposed to” in anatomy, there’s just what grows where because of your DNA and how it’s expressed (or maybe repressed) and then how the doctor cut your umbilical cord and how it fell off and healed and then how you lived and what you did to your body and then thirty-one years later you’re like “Here we are! Let’s work with what we’ve got.” ALL THAT SAID, I’m glad improbable.com exists to make me laugh.

Also see: In search of the “beautiful” umbilicus and Divine Proportions in male nipple re-positioning.

Shan’t!

(No but really, where is your navel positioned? Is it too low, like weirdly close to your pelvis? Do you have an extremely long torso and it’s right at the midpoint of your body, or are you so skinny that it stretches your superior hood and makes your navel look like a clit on your stomach?)

MADE YOU LOOK!