BellaOnline Forums Beauty and Self Beauty Basics Belly Rings

Are Belly Rings just a fad? Or, are they truly beautiful? What's your take on this? Are they more trouble than they are worth, what with infections, catching on the belt, and so on?

I actually like them, to an extend. However, I have virtually zero fashion sense.

So, I am wondering what the "divas" say.

What do you think?

Pleaes advise.

Thank you.

--Mark Kamoski

As the body art editor, I'd say you'd have to look back a hundred years from now to see if navel piercings wound up being a fad or not.

If you take the time and effort to care for them properly, they don't get infected or catch on things. I think a person's experience with a piercing says a lot about the intention or reasoning behind why they got the piercing in the first place.

Hi Rae,

Thanks for answering that one! But why do you use 100 years as a bench mark for whether a particular beauty trend is a fad or not? Is there some historic reason, or is it an arbitrary number?

And can you elaborate on your second point? I'm intrigued about how a person's experience ties in with their intent. Maybe you've written an article on this that you could point us to?

The 100 years was just arbitrary but it does give a good time frame for looking back. You can also have enough time to see if something is cyclical or on-going. When we look back from our present time to the Victorian era, you can clearly see what social habits were just faddish to the times, and which became integrated as social norms.

As for my comment about how your experience with a piercing says a lot about why you got it, I have found that folks who do it as a spur-of-the-moment "oh cool, let's do this!" thing often don't take the time to learn how to care for the piercing properly, and they are most often the people who then also decide to just abandon the piercing if they have a problem in healing it.

I've always seen it as a fad that came in when low rise jeans became popular. I have one and like it, but don't know if I'd call it beautiful.

That's understandable to me--because I can imagine the "like omg my friend just got her bellybutton pierced and like I'm like so totally gonna do it too!" type of girls being the ones who either wouldn't take care of it, or who wouldn't go to a good piercer in the first place and get good aftercare instructions....whereas those who thought about it and really cared would be more likely to make the effort.

Although you could also argue that the first is just a flightier-type in general. I wonder if you could also make a case for who was paying for it--like, would a teenager be more likely to take good care of their piercing if they had paid for it rather than their parents having paid for it?

I got my navel pierced in 1991, and I can tell from my own experience that low-rise jeans did not become a popular fashion until at least 10 years later.