What you see: Your egg whites look cloudy.
What it is: A fresh egg, which packs more carbon dioxide, leading to the cloudy look.
Eat or toss: Eat! This egg is particularly fresh.Â
Can you eat an egg if the white looks cloudy?
Yes! An egg with a cloudy white is still perfectly fine to eat. In fact, it’s fresher than an egg with a perfectly clear white.
The cloudiness is a visual effect of the higher levels carbon dioxide inside a freshly laid egg. While dissolved in the egg white, that carbon dioxide is carbonic acid, which, logically, affects the eggs’ pH. At the pH of a freshly laid egg, egg white proteins to cluster in masses large enough to deflect light rays, thus creating that cloudy look.
As time goes by, however, the carbonic acid slips out through the egg shell’s pores as carbon dioxide. This loss of acid creates more alkaline conditions in which the the proteins avoid each other. This means that, usually, by the time an egg reaches the consumer, the white has shifted from cloudy to clear. As time continues to go by and carbon dioxide continues to escape, the white will also get runnier.
As the cloudiness goes away, the egg’s air pocket will enlarge
That exiting carbon dioxide plays a role in the growth of the egg’s air cell. All eggs have a pocket of air, which is first created when the egg’s membrane contracts away from the shell as the egg cools. The air cell provides baby chicks with their first breaths of air. In the moments, days and weeks after the egg is laid, the air cell grows as carbon dioxide and moisture slip out the shell into the outside world, reducing the liquid portion of the egg’s overall volume. Ambient air—including the oxygen that baby chick needs to breathe—moves in through tiny pores in the shell and fills up the air cell. In hardboiled eggs, you usually see air cells at the base of the egg, but sometimes they behave in surprising ways; here’s an example of an egg with an air cell in an odd location; here’s one where the air cell broke up into lots of little pockets.
Eventually, when enough carbon dioxide has slipped out of the shell, the egg will float in water. Some people say this is a sign of a bad egg. That’s not quite right. It’s a sign of an older egg, and an egg that likely has a thinner white and a less dense yolk, but not necessarily a sign one has gone bad. Older eggs can be more vulnerable to microbial invaders, however, so if you ever do discover an egg that floats, my advice is to crack it into a dish and make sure it looks good and smells good before you cook it. Assuming it passes that first test, you may want to take the additional precaution of cooking the egg until the yolks are firm. That’s what I would do.
SOURCES:
- Why is an egg white sometimes cloudy? Egglands Best FAQ. Accessed March 2026.
- Is the appearance of eggs related to food safety? U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ask.USDA.gov. Nov 13, 2024. Accessed March 2026.
- What colors are normal on the inside of an egg? Egg Safety Center. Accessed March 2026.
- The Avian Embroy. Mississippi State University Extension. Reviewed by Jessica Wells, PhD, Assistant Clinical/Extension Professor, Poultry Science. Written by Tom W. Smith Jr., PhD, former Extension Poultry Specialist.
- What’s Brewing in this cloudy water? EatOrToss.com. R. Jackson. Sept, 4, 2017.
- Egg Grading. Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. Assessed March 2026.
- On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Harold McGee. 2004. p. 81.
Cloudy with a chance of scrambled eggs.
