Kate Battersby writes about her strange phobia for The Daily Mail:

For weeks, my friend Jane and I had been looking forward to our girls’ day out. There we were, flicking through the rails in blissful mid-shop, when Jane pulled out a classic white shirt.

‘You’d look good in this,’ she said. Taking one glance, I shook my head. ‘I don’t think it’s very me,’ I replied quickly. She waved it in front of me, the pearly buttons catching the light. I looked away.

‘Try it,’ she instructed. ‘You don’t have many shirts, do you? In fact, now that I think about it, you don’t have any.’ Then, she grinned. ‘Ah. Of course you don’t. It’s because of your weird button thing, isn’t it?’

Yes, I admit it. My ‘weird button thing’ is, in fact, a full-on phobia. The strange truth is that the very sight of those horrid little discs — especially mother of pearl or any small, shiny ones — makes my skin crawl and my stomach heave.

Like many women, I have far too many clothes, but very few of them have buttons. I avoid touching them unless absolutely necessary. I hate the tiny clicking sound they make when they bump against one another on a clothes rail.

The worst ones — the kind that make me want to throw up — are shiny ones hanging loosely, wobbling on a thread. I feel an urge to gag, as if I were being asked to eat rotting food.

It sounds crazy but, in fact, it’s not uncommon. Officially, it’s called koumpounophobia — from the Greek koumpouno, meaning button, and the Greek phobos, for fear — and is defined as ‘a persistent, abnormal and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous’.

Having to write the word button in this article is difficult. Actually hearing the word is revolting, and I avoid saying it unless absolutely necessary.

But I’m far from the only one. Model Poppy Delevingne, sister of Cara, admitted to the same syndrome in a recent interview.

‘I have a phobia of buttons, which I’ve had to work on because of my job. They freak me out,’ she said. ‘A friend once wore a pair of jeans with multi-coloured buttons on the pockets.

‘I was hugging her and thought: “Oh my God, what’s that?” When I saw them, I went green.’

Fashion designer Amanda Wakeley is a fellow sufferer. As a child, she wore a thick duffel coat all year round and refused to switch to her school mackintosh because, according to the strange common pattern of this phobia, she has no trouble with toggles or large metal buttons of the kind found on jeans. But shiny plastic ones make her want to vomit.

The late Steve Jobs really had it bad. The Apple tycoon’s phobia extended to push-button keypads on phones, and so he came up with the touchscreen iPhone — creating a technological revolution.