Question: so if I constantly eat carrots can I turn orange?

Eileen Diskin answered on 15 Nov 2012:

Yep, how weird is that!?!

You won’t go SUPER, BRIGHT orange, but you will get a bit of an orange tinge! I think its usually first noticed in the nose. Heres a photo of a baby with it:

Just last year, some scientists did research on this, and they wrote about their results in a paper called, “Studies on hypercarotenemia due to excessive ingestion of carrot, pumpkin and papaw” Scientists sometimes use super long words – ‘hypercarotenemia’ comes from the words ‘hyper’ (too much) and carotene (those are the pigments found in carrots, and in the shrimp and algae that flamingos eat!). And their research proved that this can really happen!

So its not only flamingos that can change colour by the foods they eat – but us too! And its funny, flamingos copy us a bit as well – sort of like how we use makeup, flamingos use oils that they secrete (that contain these pigments) as a sort of ‘make-up’ so they look even pinker!