People who collect coins are called numismatists, and stamp collectors are known as philatelists, but what do you call a person who collects belly button lint? At present, the best term for such a person is “Graham Barker,” who holds the record for the world’s largest collection of navel fluff.

Barker, a resident of Perth, Australia, first harvested and saved the contents of his belly button on January 17, 1984, and has been making a daily practice of it ever since.
As of October 2010, he had collected 22.1 grams, filling 3.25 jars. Barker, who is a librarian by trade, once considered using the collection to stuff a pillow. Instead, he sold three of the jars to a museum for an undisclosed amount of money.
Of course, Barker’s navel-fluff achievement is only one exhibit in the grand museum of humanity’s determination to make absolutely anything record-worthy. For more evidence that people will compete over categories no sensible civilization would have thought to regulate, take a look at our article on the world record for having the most world records. It turns out that once someone starts keeping score, there is apparently no human activity too strange, too niche, or too lint-adjacent to be immortalized.

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