Lash Eggs, Fart Eggs and Generally Weird Eggs.

September 8, 2019 by Karen 61 Comments

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If you have chickens you've seen it. That misshapen, blobby, too big, too small, or just plain weird egg to come shooting out of one of your hens. If you DON'T have chickens, you're not going to believe what kind of eggs are edited out of your grocery store carton. This is their story.

Eggs in various shades of brown and pale-olive in a wooden crate on a white background.

As someone who buys their eggs at the store, you've been protected your whole life from the oddities of eggs. The weird, horrifying, amusing, and curious mistakes. But let me tell you - you're being protected from some pretty gross stuff.

As a backyard chicken owner, you may go out to your coop every morning and come back with a collection of perfectly normal eggs.

Then, one day, in front of you is an egg that looks like a Ripley's Believe it or Not penis.

It happens. Welcome to the world of chicken keeping.

Lash eggs, Fart Eggs & Other Weird Eggs.

A pale beige misshapen form (lash egg) sitting on the blade of a paint scraper.

This was my first weird egg.

The Lash Egg

Lash eggs are misshapen rubbery blobs. The most horrifying part is they are indeed eggs. Probably not ones you'd want to eat unless doing so would result in winning millions of dollars and being named sole Survivor.

Lash eggs often happen when a chicken is sick but can also be a sign that if they *are* sick, they're getting better. || Read my in depth post on lash eggs and see what's INSIDE them. ||

There is zero chance you'll ever find one of these in your grocery store carton of eggs.
NOT safe to eat.

The Fart Egg

Eggs stacked on top of each other on a rustic wooden crate against a white background. At the top of the stack is a fart (or fairy) egg.

Tiny Fart egg at top of stack.

Also known by the more Disney term, the Fairy Egg, these eggs happen when a hen first learns to lay. Although the Fairy egg at the top of this pile was my first ever Fairy Egg and it came from a seasoned hen. It was from Baby. The mean hen.

Karen Bertelsen's mean white chicken named Baby against a white background.

Fairy eggs typically only consist of the white part of the egg (the albumen) but mine had a yolk in it, which you'll see in the next photo.

Fart eggs are never sold by commercial producers, you won't accidentally end up with one in a carton. But if you WANT teeny tiny eggs, buy quail's eggs. Fart eggs are about the same size.
Safe but ultimately not very filling to eat.

The Blood Spotted Egg

Two cracked eggs (one with the broken shell beside it) on a white background. The yolk of the egg in the foreground has two blood spots. — the egg on top is a tiny fairy egg, the egg below has blood spots.

Chickens (particularly brown egg laying chickens) can work so hard to get that egg out of them that they burst a blood vessel. When this happens, the egg it's forming at the time will pick up that burst blood vessel and there you have it - an egg with a blood spots.

Eggs can also have something called meat spots which show up on the white of the egg as opposed to the yolk. Meat spots happen when the egg picks up tissue along the chicken's oviduct. You can recognize them because they look more like a lump than the smooth look of a blood spot.

Chances are you won't get these from store bought eggs, but the odd one does sneak into cartons. You're more likely to have this problem in brown eggs because the dark shell of brown eggs are harder to detect abnormalities through. Commercial producers "candle" their eggs to ensure customers don't get visually assaulted with blood spotted eggs. Candling eggs is just shining bright light through the eggshell so shadows can be seen inside of it. But the dark coloured shell of brown eggs makes seeing through the shell through candling more difficult than with a white egg. Brown egg layers are also more prone to laying eggs with blood spots than white egg layers.
Safe to eat. If it grosses you out (it grosses me out) just use a bit of shell to cut the offending portion of the egg out.

If you want to decrease your chances of getting an egg with blood or meal spots at the grocery store, buy white eggs.

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Brown and white eggs are the same thing. There's NO nutritional difference at all. The colour of the egg is just based on the colour of the chicken - brown chicken = brown egg. White chicken = white egg. (actually it depends on their earlobe colour but generally that matches the colour of the hen)

Blotches, Speckles and Mends on Eggs.

Four eggs in a row on a white background. The left-most is a blotched egg, the next is a mended egg and the next two are speckled eggs.

A Quick Lesson in Egg Colour

Eggs are white. All eggs start out their life inside the chicken as white. It's when the egg is rolling through the chickens oviduct that colour is painted onto it.

You can test whether this is true by paying attention to the inside of a brown chicken eggshell when you crack it open. The outside of it is brown but the inside is white.

The only exception to this is the egg of the Ameraucana which lays blue eggs. Their shell still starts out as white but they deposit their colour onto the egg early on. This gives the colour a chance to seep through the entire shell making the inside of it blue as well.

Egg Colour Abnormalities

BLOTCHES - Egg #1

Some breeds paint the pigment onto their eggs just before they lay it. When they lay it a "wet paint" sign beside it would be appropriate. If you touch the egg immediately to collect it, a lot of the paint will come right off on your finger leaving a spot with no colour on the egg. (The egg underneath won't be white usually because some of the colour dye immediately soaks into the shell.)

MENDS - Egg #2

Egg shells can break or be formed poorly during the calcification process (the process where the shell is being made). The hen mends the crack or hole in the shell before laying.

SPECKLES - Eggs #1 & #3

Speckles on eggs are perfectly normal. It's just extra deposits of calcium. It can also be caused by a defective shell gland. If you're LUCKY your grocery store eggs will have these beautiful speckles.

You're unlikely to encounter any of these things other than speckles from commercially produced eggs.
All safe to eat.

Huge Egg.

Three eggs on a rustic wooden background. The topmost is a huge pale-green egg, the middle is a small light-blue egg and the bottom is a regular-size speckled brown egg.

A large grocery store egg normally weighs 56 grams. A double yolker can weigh 100 grams! But just because the egg is huge doesn't mean it's a double yolker. The odd time a hen will just lay an insanely huge egg that has the largest yolk you've ever seen. In 2016 my Black Copper Marans laid a whopping 96 gram single yolked egg. || See the biggest yolk you've ever seen here in my post on it! ||

These kind of HUGE eggs don't make it into grocery store cartons. Partly because they literally will not fit in a carton. The lid won't shut! But you will the odd time get a double yolker!
Safe to eat.

Egg With No Shell.

An egg with no shell is exactly what it sounds like. You might think that would mean a chicken would just lay a yolk and egg, but the yolk and egg are contained within a thin membrane. The shell is formed over that. If for some reason the chicken doesn't form a shell the egg will come out with just the membrane.

An egg with no shell feels like a squishy stress ball. The reason it has no shell could be that the chicken was scared or stressed when they were about to form the shell, lack of calcium or just old age.

Yeah. Zero chance of an egg farmer letting one of these into the carton mix.
Safe to eat! But because it has no shell it will spoil faster and the inside will evaporate more quickly.

O.K. maybe zero chance of you getting one of these is an exaggeration. Mistakes ALWAYS happen.

So. Tell me, because I'm curious. Have you ever found any of these things in your grocery store bought carton of eggs? And more importantly ... did you eat it?