I’m not sure if “turning white/pale” is an exaggeration or if people actually do turn pale in certain situations. I’ve never witnessed it myself, anyone here who has?
In: Biology
yeah, i do. i’m super pale, like a step away from albino lol. you can tell when i get freaked out because i either turn white or bright red. another time this saying is appropriate is with needles/blood draws. i will sometimes almost turn green when i get my blood drawn or even get piercings because i have a really sensitive vagus nerve reflex. pale people are a mystery (edit to add, yes i am a red head)
When I’ve had bad panic before, I’ve gotten pale and you can usually tell by the color in the lips growing fainter. Unfortunately I’ve also seen it happen to my daughter several times. She can’t handle the sight of blood and her little lips turn very light in color and I have to make sure she doesn’t pass out. It’s very scary to see you little one like this!
But it happens when your body rushes blood to your major organs to keep you going and protect you.
My son has red hair and is obviously pale skinned. He literally turns green when he’s sick. It’s so weird.
They also flush red when angry or embarrassed and there is NO hiding it. 🤣
In response to stress and/or perceived threats, adrenalin surging from two glands above kidneys triggers the “fight or flee” reaction, causing peripheral vasoconstriction and tachycardia, which along with bronchodilation ready one for action.
My daughter got her fingers slammed in a door at a friend’s house. The dad brought her home and I knew immediately she broke her fingers due to her pale white face and blank expression. Pure shock.
Yes, her face was noticeably “white as a ghost”
I’ve turned pale! Some commenters here have done an excellent job at explaining why and how it happens and honestly they’ve explained it far better than I can.
For me, I’m undergoing diagnostics for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, a form of dysautonomia/autonomic nervous system dysfunction/autonomic neuropathy, and I start going pale when I’m standing up or when I’m nauseated. The colour completely drains if I’m about to pass out, and I’m often in a state of pre-syncope (that feeling before you pass out, but I just live like that lol). I also get blood pooling when upright—more blood pools in my lower limbs than it should, and it doesn’t get pushed back up effectively, so my body responds by increasing my heart rate to get blood to my brain, and sometimes it decides to surprise me with sudden adrenaline dumps (nasty horrible feeling!). I stand up, and my heart rate goes up by over 30 beats per minute. If I stay standing for too long, I’m gonna pass out. I’m gonna have to have a tilt table in the future to confirm it’s POTS where they’ll strap me to a table, tilt me up, and see what happens. My mom can always tell when I’m about to get too dizzy even when I don’t think it’s that bad yet, because the colour just drains from me. During my worst flare-up, my blood pressure had tanked from dehydration and the colour didn’t come back to my face for most of my hospital stay (where I was first told its highly likely POTS). “Looks like you’ve seen a ghost” not only applies to me, but *I* look like the ghost that *other people* have seen, lmao! It’s easy to tell when I’m starting to recover because the colour comes back to my cheeks, although sometimes I flare up again and boom, ghost mode again.
In darker skinned individuals, it’s not always so obvious, although if you know somebody well enough, you may notice they look more ashy/grey, or maybe a little yellowed in comparison to usual (I’m pale and I’ve looked…greenish, which I didn’t know was actually genuinely a thing and not just a turn of phrase until it happened to me). I think iirc you can see it in the mostly palms of darker skinned folks, and you may also see it in their: nail beds; soles of their feet; oral mucosa; sclera; and the conjunctiva, as there’s often less melanin there.
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