Tap the shade closest to what you saw

Judge it in a clear container under ordinary light if you can. Toilet water dilutes the sample and a blue cleaner block shifts the whole thing green.

None of the above

My urine is pink, red, brown or cola-coloured

Nothing you tap here is saved, sent or counted. The page has no account, no analytics on your answers and no storage. Want it on paper instead? Print the chart.

Your reading

Pick a shade to start

Choose the swatch nearest to what you actually saw, not the one you would like it to be. You will get a plain reading and, where it is needed, how much to drink and by when.

What this chart cannot tell you

It lags behind you. Colour reflects the last hour or two, not your day. Drink half a litre and the next sample can look pale while you are still in deficit.
Morning urine is darker by design. You have not drunk anything for eight hours. A concentrated first pee is normal, not a failing grade.
B vitamins overwrite the signal. Riboflavin turns urine a bright fluorescent yellow for hours. Harmless, but the chart is useless until it clears.
Clear is not a high score. Colourless urine all day long can simply mean you are drinking more than you need.

For a daily target rather than a spot check, the water intake calculator works from your weight, activity and climate.

Dehydration self-check

Tick anything you have right now. Colour is one signal; how you feel is another, and they disagree often enough to be worth asking separately.

0 of 7 ticked

Nothing ticked yet

If none of those apply and your shade sits in the top three, you are in good shape and there is nothing here to fix.

Why this is a nudge, not a diagnosis

Every symptom on that list has a dozen other causes. Headache, tiredness and dry mouth are among the least specific complaints in medicine — they answer to sleep debt, caffeine withdrawal, low blood sugar, a virus, allergy medication and plain stress at least as readily as they answer to fluid loss. The two heavier signals, standing up dizzy and not having passed urine for six hours or more, are the ones that genuinely point at volume depletion, which is why they count double here.

The useful way to read it: drink properly for two hours and see what changes. Symptoms caused by dehydration ease in that window. Symptoms that do not ease were about something else, and that is worth knowing too.

What urine colour actually measures

Urine gets its colour mostly from urochrome — also called urobilin — a pigment your body produces at a fairly constant rate as old red blood cells are broken down. That rate barely changes across a day. What changes is how much water the pigment is dissolved in. Drink more and your kidneys pass the same pigment out in more fluid, so it looks paler. Drink less and they reclaim water, concentrating the waste and deepening the colour. That is the entire mechanism: a colour chart is a way of eyeballing how concentrated your urine is.

It works better than it has any right to. Eight-point charts of this kind have been used in sports science for decades because shade tracks urine specific gravity and osmolality closely enough for field screening — good enough to flag an athlete who should drink before training. “Good enough for field screening” is a long way from a laboratory measurement, and no colour chart has ever been a diagnostic instrument. Read shades 1–3 as reassurance, 4–6 as a nudge, 7–8 as a real deficit, and do not squeeze more precision out of it than that.

Why B vitamins turn urine bright yellow

If you take a multivitamin or a B-complex and an hour later your urine is a startling fluorescent yellow-green, that is riboflavin — vitamin B2 — and it is harmless. Riboflavin is water-soluble and intensely coloured. Your body absorbs what it needs and excretes the surplus, and supplement doses routinely run many times the roughly 1.1–1.3 mg a day an adult actually requires. Energy drinks and pre-workout powders are frequently fortified with the same vitamins and do the same thing.

The practical consequence is that for several hours afterwards the chart is useless to you. The added pigment simply drowns out the signal you were trying to read. If you take supplements, check first thing in the morning or well clear of the dose.

Foods and medicines that change the colour

Beetroot is the famous one. Beeturia — pink or red urine after eating beets — shows up in something like 10–14% of people and is entirely harmless. Blackberries and rhubarb can do something similar.
Carrots and large vitamin C doses can push the colour towards orange.
Fava beans, aloe and senna can darken urine towards brown.
Medicines. Rifampicin turns urine orange-red, phenazopyridine bright orange, metronidazole and nitrofurantoin dark brown, levodopa dark, and methylene blue or propofol can turn it blue-green. Several chemotherapy drugs change it too.

None of this makes the chart wrong so much as inapplicable. If you already know why it is that colour, the chart has nothing to add.

When colour is a medical sign, not a hydration one

Dehydration darkens urine along a yellow-to-amber axis. It does not produce pink, red, brown or cola. Those colours deserve a clinician:

Pink or red can mean blood in the urine — from infection or stones, and less commonly from bladder or kidney disease.
Tea or cola-coloured after unusually hard exercise can be rhabdomyolysis, muscle breakdown that releases myoglobin and can damage the kidneys. That one is an emergency.
Dark brown with pale stools, itching or yellowing of the eyes or skin points towards the liver or bile ducts.
Cloudy urine with burning, urgency or fever suggests a urinary tract infection.

You cannot tell beeturia from blood by looking at it, and the cost of guessing wrong runs entirely in one direction. Get it checked.

The limits of the method

It is a delayed snapshot. Colour describes the last hour or two, not your whole day, and it moves 30–60 minutes behind what you drank.
Morning urine is concentrated on purpose. Eight hours without fluid is supposed to produce a darker first void.
Colourless is not the goal. Persistently clear urine can mean you are drinking more than you need, and for endurance athletes drinking heavily over many hours it is a warning sign for low blood sodium (hyponatraemia), which is dangerous in the opposite direction.
The bathroom lies to you. Toilet water dilutes the sample, blue cleaner blocks turn everything green, and warm bulbs flatter the shade. A clear cup under daylight is a fairer test.
It says nothing about your particular situation. Kidney disease, heart failure, diabetes, diuretics and pregnancy all change the picture, and some of them change how much you should be drinking in the direction of less, not more.

Inside those limits it remains the cheapest hydration check there is, and a considerably better one than counting the glasses you half-remember drinking.

Urine colour chart: are you actually hydrated?