Vomit can range from clear to green, yellow, red, brown, or black, and each color generally reflects what’s in your stomach at the time. Most often, the color comes from recently eaten food, bile, stomach acid, or (less commonly) blood. Here’s what each color typically means and when it signals something more serious.
Clear or White Vomit
Clear vomit is mostly water and stomach acid. It usually means your stomach is already empty, which is why you’ll often see it after several rounds of vomiting or if you haven’t eaten in a while. Foamy white vomit has a similar explanation: your stomach is churning up acid and mucus with nothing else to bring up.
This color is common with stomach bugs, acid reflux, and morning sickness during pregnancy. Certain foods can also trigger it, especially acidic carbonated drinks or high-fat junk food eaten on an otherwise empty stomach. Alcohol irritates the stomach lining in much the same way and can produce foamy vomit, particularly after a night of heavy drinking. Conditions like GERD, where the valve between the esophagus and stomach doesn’t close properly, can also cause repeated episodes of foamy or clear vomit alongside heartburn and indigestion.
Yellow Vomit
Yellow vomit is bile that has been partially digested by stomach acid. Bile is a fluid your liver makes to help break down fats, and it’s normally green when it first enters your small intestine. Once it sits in the stomach and mixes with acid, it turns yellow.
The most common reason for yellow vomit is simply having nothing else in your stomach. If you’re throwing up from a stomach bug, food poisoning, or while fasting, yellow is the color you’ll likely see once any food is gone. Repeated yellow vomiting alongside abdominal pain can point to bile reflux, gastritis (irritation of the stomach lining), or an intestinal blockage, so it’s worth paying attention to what other symptoms come with it.
Green Vomit
Green vomit is also bile, but in this case it hasn’t been digested yet. The green color means the bile moved up from the intestine before stomach acid had a chance to break it down. A single episode of green vomit after a bout of illness isn’t unusual.
However, repeated green vomiting with abdominal pain can signal bile reflux, a stomach infection, or an intestinal blockage. In newborns and young infants, green vomit carries special urgency. Classic teaching in pediatric surgery holds that bile vomiting in a newborn should be treated as intestinal obstruction until proven otherwise. In cases of small bowel volvulus (a dangerous twisting of the intestine), green vomit may be the only early warning sign. A BMJ study found that many parents and even some doctors don’t recognize green as the color of bile in infant vomit, which can delay critical surgical referral. Green vomiting in a baby is considered a surgical emergency.
In older children and adults, green vomit can also come from eating green foods or drinks, so context matters. If you just drank a green smoothie and threw up something green, that’s the straightforward explanation.
Orange Vomit
Orange vomit typically reflects partially digested food. If you ate recently and then threw up, the color is often just your last meal mixed with stomach acid. Foods with natural or artificial orange pigments (carrots, sweet potatoes, orange-flavored drinks) will show up clearly. This color on its own is rarely concerning unless vomiting persists or is accompanied by severe pain.
Red or Pink Vomit
Red or pink vomit can come from red foods and drinks (beets, tomato soup, red sports drinks), but it can also indicate fresh blood. Bright red blood in vomit means there is an active bleed somewhere in the upper digestive tract, and the bleeding may be heavy.
Common causes of bloody vomit include a Mallory-Weiss tear, which is a rip in the lining of the esophagus caused by violent or prolonged vomiting (often after heavy alcohol use). Another cause is ruptured blood vessels in the esophagus or stomach, which can develop in people with liver disease. Stomach ulcers can also bleed enough to produce red vomit. If you see red and you haven’t recently eaten red-colored food, this warrants urgent medical attention. The Mayo Clinic lists blood in vomit as a reason to go to urgent care or an emergency room.
Brown or Black Vomit
Brown vomit often comes from food that has been partially digested, like chocolate or brown-colored meals. But dark brown or black vomit that looks like coffee grounds is a different situation entirely. That grainy, dark appearance comes from blood that has been sitting in the digestive tract long enough for stomach acid to dry and darken it. By the time the vomiting reflex kicks in, the blood has congealed and changed color, which is why it no longer looks red.
The most common cause of coffee-ground vomit is a bleeding ulcer in the stomach or upper small intestine. This is a sign of upper gastrointestinal bleeding that needs medical evaluation, even if the amount seems small.
There’s also a widespread belief that brown, foul-smelling vomit means someone is “vomiting feces” due to a bowel obstruction. In reality, this is exceedingly rare. About 75% of bowel obstructions occur in the small intestine, where feces haven’t actually formed yet. A small bowel blockage can produce dark, unpleasant-smelling vomit, but it isn’t actual stool. Even in a large bowel obstruction, feces would have to travel backward past a one-way valve and through roughly 18 feet of intestine to reach the stomach, which almost never happens. True fecal vomiting requires an abnormal connection (fistula) between the large and small bowel, which is a rare surgical situation. That said, vomit that has a fecal odor is still a reason to call emergency services, as the Mayo Clinic lists it as a 911-level warning sign.
When Color Signals an Emergency
Most vomit colors are explained by what you recently ate or drank, and a single episode of yellow or green vomit during a stomach bug is normal. The colors that demand prompt attention are red (fresh blood), dark brown or black with a coffee-ground texture (old blood), and green in a newborn. Vomit with a fecal smell, regardless of color, also requires emergency evaluation.
For everything else, what matters more than color is the pattern. Vomiting that persists for more than 24 hours, comes with severe abdominal pain, prevents you from keeping down fluids, or follows a head injury deserves medical attention regardless of what color it is.