Ohnoes, Playboy Ate Her Belly Button
There’s an interesting “urban legend” quality to the story surround this photograph of a hot model whose belly button has been photoshopped away by evil villains unknown:
If you google around, you can find the photo in dozens of places. Source links, when given, all seem to lead back to here. And nobody knows anything except the oddly-specific-yet-completely-unsourced text there:
Can you believe that?! This brazilian model “lost” her belly button as the Playboy magazine editors were retouching her body curves. The mistake went unnoticed, and the magazine sold 605,000 copies that month… lots of readers got pissed off when they realized they were wasting money on fake pictures.
I wonder why they put so much effort on photoshopping their girls, when most of them need no retouching at all!
Do you notice how much in common this has with an urban legend? There are curiously specific details in a story which has no verifiable source information whatsoever. No date for the magazine in which this photo supposedly appeared despite oddly specific sales figures, no link to a photo gallery, and nary a one of those “pissed off readers” identified.
Now, photoshop flails do happen, as ErosBlog has been documenting since the beginning. And it’s entirely possible that this story is real. But my suspicious mind tells me that the photoshopping in question — and the construction of that plausible-but-unsourced story — may be the work of a clever link baiter.
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As a dabbler in photoshop, I too find it difficult to understand how someone could “accidently” erase a navel. The posting reminds me of the fighting with artists throughout the centuries over whether or not paintings of Adam and Eve should have belly buttons (if they were presumably never birthed…). Unless this woman is supposed to be representing Eve, gimmie the yummy navels… Please!
My brother knows someone who has omphalophobia. She was deathly afraid of her own belly button. Whenever she saw it or thought about it, she felt like her body was falling apart. Ultimately she got plastic surgery to have it removed.
Now, I’m not saying that’s what happened here! But I wonder if there’s a market in porn for omphalophobics.
a friend’s father has no navel. something to do with the tied-off umbilicus becoming infected as a child and being sewn up in such a way as to leave it flat with no indentation. depriving lint of a home, that’s just cruel.
Having lived in Brazil until recently, I remember this story when it first came out (as I was reading your post, the story I knew kept coming to my mind until I confirmed, scrolling down, that it was the same Brazilian one). What I certainly do remember, however, it that although the story was similar, the actual photo was completely different. The detail of the “missing” navel was somewhat more subtle, and could have passed unnoticed by a more unperceptive viewer.
It is interesting to see how urban legends are created, stitching fiction and fact to make the improbable credible…
Some years ago I worked for an agency that did “prepress” work for a certain nation-wide discount retailer’s Sunday circulars. A large part of our job was processing photography. We would often joke with one another, wondering if we were to “clone out” the underwear models’ bellybuttons, whether or not anyone would notice.
It is so inconsequentially easy to do in Photoshop, it is very tempting.
Occasionally if the underwear was too shear, and the model particularly hirsute and dark-haired, we would get marked up proofs requesting that we clone out the “dark spot.”
It,s my first time in your blog, and I find it
very interesting. Just to add a detail on
deconstruting this urban legend (which I didn,t
knew before): how come a brazilian model is
posing with Spain’s National Football (soccer)
Team uniform?
Greetings and pleasures.
She is evidently a test tube creation. In Vitro leaves no trace of a belly button.
Thanks for that bit of critical thinking Bacchus, it really made me think about origin of so much of the “fantastic” images we see on the web.
P.S. Do you hate my Name as Much as I hate yours??