A new viral TikTok trend has people “carrotmaxxing” — eating three or more full-sized carrots a day — to try to get glowy, tan skin (without the skin cancer risk). TikToker @lisa.alkntra shared a time-lapse clip in one of her videos, showing her skin getting progressively more tan from September through December. Another TikToker @kendramfit shared a video of her tan, claiming that instead of self-tanner, she is “just eating an excessive amount of carrots.”
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Eating an excessive amount of carrots causes carotenemia, “a condition that causes a yellow-orange hue to the skin because of eating beta-carotene-rich foods,” explained Dr. Corrie Alford, a board-certified dermatologist at MetroDerm in Atlanta. You can also achieve the same effect by eating squash, sweet potatoes, pumpkin or oranges. Alford explained, “When a person takes in more beta-carotene than the body needs, the extra gets stored in body fat and can build up in the outermost layer of the skin, causing the yellow or orange hue.”
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And while “carrotmaxxing” may help alter your skin pigmentation to a degree, it won’t necessarily make you look like you have an even, spread-out tan like you were hoping for. Although some people call it a “healthy glow,” Alford compares it to “a bad spray tan” instead.
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Too much of a good thing can have harmful effects, and that includes carrots and other beta-carotene-containing foods. “Excess vitamin A, known as hypervitaminosis A, can have toxic effects,” Alford said. “Luckily, the body only converts a small amount of beta-carotene to vitamin A, making hypervitaminosis A unlikely from eating carrots alone.”
And I don't like carrots quite that much.
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