Why can eating too many carrots turn your skin orange?

Eating a lot of carrots or sweet potatoes can genuinely turn skin orange. The condition is called carotenosis: when you take in more carotenoid pigments than usual, they are deposited in the fats between the cells of the skin's outermost layer and tint it. It's harmless and reversible, but it is real: the color change usually becomes visible after 4 to 7 weeks of high intake.

The effect depends on dose. Visible carotenosis tends to show up once beta-carotene intake passes about 20 milligrams a day, far more than the average American adult eats in a day (around 2.3 milligrams), but not an unreasonable amount to reach on purpose: a single medium carrot already contains about 4.0 milligrams. Because the pigment collects where skin is thickest and sweats most, the color shows up strongest on the palms, soles, knees, and the folds beside the nose, though it can spread more widely.

Babies and small children are especially prone to it, because their food is pureed and processed, which makes the carotene inside it easier to absorb. A small jar of baby food made from sweet potatoes or carrots can contain 400 to 500 percent of an infant's recommended daily carotene.

Doctors can usually tell carotenosis apart from jaundice, which it superficially resembles, in one simple way: carotenosis spares the whites of the eyes, while jaundice turns them yellow along with the skin. It also tends to show up more clearly under artificial light than jaundice does. Carotenosis needs no treatment: once someone cuts back on carotenoid-rich food, the color fades on its own, though it can take several months to disappear completely.