Why is lint blue

Learn More ». Give Now ». Noon Edition. Home Archives About Contact. Media Player Error Update your browser or Flash plugin. The reason why the fluff stays in the navel is either because the navel contains perspiration that the fluff clings to as some suggest or because the fluff simply lodges there because the navel is set lower than its surroundings. Supporting this theory is the fact that outward-protruding navels rarely collect fluff. However, the fluff of people who wear a variety of colours still tends to be blue, because blue is the result of combining a number of different colours, just as the fluff found in the filters of washing and drying machines tends to be bluish in colour being a combination of the fibres from all of the clothes in the load.

Your email address will not be published. Just soak the sweaters in some hot water, wring them out and place them in the dryer. Thoroughly clean the lint catcher before drying the sweaters and the wool lint you gather will be excellent raw material for homemade felt. Live Science. Fluff tends to take on the colour of the cotton fibres it's mostly made of Credit: Getty Images. But Steinhauser took his research one step further.

If his navel fluff were made solely of fibres from his t-shirt, then the analysis would reveal that the lint was made entirely of cellulose. What he found, however, was that other debris became folded into navel lint as well.

Based on the chemical readout, Steinhauser suspects that the remaining matter is made of house dust, flakes of skin, fat, proteins, and sweat. Stomach hairs, it seems, do not discriminate. Based on this, he reasoned that those whose navels accumulate fluff might have generally cleaner and more hygienic belly buttons, because the removal of lint takes everything else along for the ride. While only a scant few researchers have committed their time and energy to exploring the ontogeny of navel fluff — perhaps Kruszelnicki and Steinhauser are the only ones — there is a serious research effort underway at North Carolina State University to understand what else lives in our belly buttons.

But the researchers weren't all that interested in the lint. Instead, they wanted to understand the belly button microbiome.

So they set out to find out what bacteria live inside of our navels. Beginning with that initial study there has since been a second round of sampling , Dunn and his team have discovered tremendous microbiological diversity hiding in belly buttons, a veritable treasure trove of microscopic lifeforms. Navel adaptation In the 60 samples they first assessed, they counted at least 2, species and suspect that figure is likely an underestimate.

To put that into context, that's more than twice the biodiversity of North American birds or ants. But most of those species were rare: 2, of them were present in the navels of fewer than six people.