“I figured if I could share with a few moms then they would not go through the same panic I had initially experienced.”
The first time Jo Johnson Overby looked down and realized her breast milk was pumping out pink, she panicked. At the time, the new mom was only a few months into breastfeeding and pumping. And up until now, her milk had never resembled anything close to the color of strawberry milk.
“I was shocked at first because I hadn’t been in pain or experiencing anything that prepared me [for the change],” the 28-year-old tells Romper. “I immediately called my sister to see if I should be concerned enough to call my doctor.
What she learned was that pink breast milk is not uncommon. In fact, breast milk can appear yellow, orange, blue, green, and even brown depending on a number of different things. For Johnson Overby, the culprit was blood. “I had had some bleeding on my nipples from adjusting to exclusively pumping and so I thought that was the culprit but I wanted confirmation from another mom for sure,” she says. “She reassured me that it was actually common.”
Last month, Johnson Overby took her pink breast milk public, sharing her experience in a TikTok video that has since gone viral. “Nobody told me that whenever I had a baby, that if I chose to breastfeed my milk would come in an array of colors,” Johnson Overby said in the video, which has gathered more than 14 million views, 2 million likes, and more than 24,000 shares.
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