Puking Rainbows

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Published September 24, 2026

Puking Rainbows is a drawing gag that shows a cute character, often an anthropomorphized rainbow itself, vomiting a bright multicolored stream. It began with a 2006 I-mockery post about Little Tokyo's loud Japanese snack packaging and grew into a full curation site, art-class assignment, and a Charlie the Unicorn running joke.

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Overview

Puking Rainbows pairs cute character design with the unsavory act of throwing up, swapping anything realistic for a bright multicolored stream. The earliest versions drew a smiling rainbow arc mid-heave, spitting out yet another rainbow from its mouth3. Over time illustrators applied the same joke to cats, unicorns, stick figures and photographed people, keeping the gag but shifting the subject.

Cute Overload featured a nice series of rainbow-vomit images in April 2007 as an ironic answer to viewers overwhelmed by saccharine art1. Urban Dictionary entries added a second meaning, where saying you are "puking rainbows" is a sarcastic way to describe reluctance toward something excessively sugary or sentimental2.

Origin & Background

Platform
I-mockery blog / RainbowPuke.com (viral spread)
Creator
RoG
Date
2006

The idea came from a blog post on I-mockery by site owner RoG on August 6, 2006, describing a trip to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. In reviewing a Japanese supermarket, RoG called out the neon packaging of the snacks and joked that it looked like a rainbow had thrown up3. Readers answered the joke within days with their own drawings of puking rainbows.

On August 17, 2006, RoG domain-registered the single-topic blog RainbowPuke.com and turned it into a gallery for reader submissions of the gag3.

How It Spread

RainbowPuke.com went dark for a stretch and came back in June 2009 as a rebuilt gallery site3. That same summer, artists on deviantART began posting their own puking rainbow illustrations, and cute-culture blogs like Cute Overload pointed readers to rainbow-vomit art as an antidote to twee overload1.

Merch sites like Zazzle picked up rainbow-vomit T-shirts, and a foundation art class at Virginia Commonwealth University even got the theme as a class assignment, with student work later featured on RoG's site3.

On June 28, 2010, the web series Charlie the Unicorn dropped a special titled "charlie teh unicron episode 1" that used a rainbow-puke gag around the 20-second mark. The randomness of the scene appealed to other YouTubers and spawned a strand of YouTube Poop edits known as "Rainbow Bleh"3.

How to Use This Meme

Artists typically draw a cute subject mid-vomit and replace the expected fluid with a bright rainbow stream. The setup often includes a smiling or wide-eyed character so the tone stays cute rather than gross. Some people use the image sincerely for over-the-top sweetness, and others use the phrase sarcastically to react to something they find too sugary2.

Frequently Asked Questions