Though CJ’s outie belly button eventually went away, I was curious enough to learn what an outie really is. Technically called an umbilicus, a belly button is really a scar, the healed over area of everybody’s first injury: the severing of the umbilical cord. After the cord is cut, the hole through which it travelled between the muscles of the abdomen, called the umbilical ring, usually closes as the cord stump dries up and drops off. Sometimes, this hole does not close all the way, which allows abdominal fluid or intestines to poke through a little bit, thus causing an outie.
Or, put more simply by WebMD:
You may also notice your baby is an “outie.” This may be an umbilical hernia, meaning the area around the navel sticks out because of weak muscles around the belly button.
The article goes on to say, “Trying to fix it by taping a coin over it is, alas, an old wives’ tale.” Parenting magazine goes even further and states, “Don’t tape a coin over the navel, a traditional trick. The metal in the coin can irritate your baby’s skin.”
Dr Greene addresses this trick as well [emphasis mine].
In the not too distant past, the most popular medical treatment for umbilical hernias was to push in the pouch and tape a coin over the belly button to prevent it from pooching out again. Most of the time this worked and the umbilical hernia disappeared by the time the baby was a year old. Umbilical bands or straps were a variation on this theme.
We now know that not using a coin, band, or strap works just as well — and avoids skin irritation. Over 85 percent of umbilical hernias will disappear by age one even if you do nothing at all.
Some outies, however, never recede. They just stay, normally, healthily, out. Nobody seems to know why, but the manner in which scar tissue forms during the umbilical healing process is the leading candidate. And, apparently, having an outie can be traumatic.
Jon Bowen, in the Salon article, “Navel Battle” writes that he can “still remember the trauma and ridicule, the stares and snickers that I was forced to endure as a child outie.” Seeing innies as the norm, he did everything he could to hide his outie. He quotes Mark Twain as an explanation of his shame: “Children have but little charity for one another’s defects.”
His research showed him that,
the popularity of innies isn’t uniquely American — it spans the globe. In 1995 the Wall Street Journal reported that the number of bellybutton reconstructions in Japan had gone up 375 percent in one year. A Tokyo hospital president was quoted in the article as saying, “People want navels that aren’t assertive.” The perfect navel, concluded the reporter, is “vertical, very narrow, and absolutely symmetrical.” An innie, in other words.
The procedure is called umbilcoplasty, and is apparently on the rise. Clive Thompson wrote about it in the New York Times in 2002, and at the time, one California plastic surgeon was charging $3500 for the procedure. Thompson cites a study that supported the Tokyo navel aesthetic, and concludes, “as for you ‘outies’ — well, keep your shirts on.”
If I ever run into that former co-worker again, I’m going to thank him for telling me that my daughter’s belly button was ugly. It might have been very expensive for me to fix such a hideous disfiguration.
I’ll also tell him that I bought a magic rock that I placed in the crib next to CJ every night, and it made the outie go away.
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