Home pregnancy tests are chosen by most women, firstly because they are cheaper than a clinic test, and secondly because they offer you the possibility of finding out this personal result from the comfort of your own home. But when you choose a home pregnancy test you have to get on with all: to take the test and to read its result by yourself. At a first view, this doesn’t look like a big deal: you put a stick in your urine and after a few minutes you can check it and find out the result - one pink line means you are pregnant and two pink lines mean you are not pregnant. It is as simple as that.. But what do you do when you get a pink line and the other line is a faint one? What does that mean? Are you pregnant or not?

Usually, a faint line in the test area of a pregnancy test indicates a positive result - meaning that you are pregnant. But you are probably wondering: Why is this line so faint?. Well, there are many reasons and most of them can be avoided if you pay attention to the way you take the test.

A first reason for getting such a faint line could be the low test sensitivity. As you know, the home pregnancy tests work by detecting the presence and levels of hCG in a woman’s body, but some of them can be more sensitive than others and can detect a lower level of hCG. So if you take the test fairly early, make sure that it is a more sensitive one for getting an accurate result. Also, the moment you take the test could be another reason for the appearance of a faint line: if you take the test too early it is likely that you do not have enough hCG in your body that could be detected, because it’s produced by the placenta after the implantation and this occurs at least 6 days after ovulation.

It is very important too, to read the pregnancy test result within the test reaction time (usually 5-10 minutes), because later the urine can dissolve and all you’ll get may be some “evaporation lines”. You have to be careful, as well, to the amount of urine you are using for, because a small one could be insufficient for getting an accurate result.

A faint pregnancy test line could appear as well when you are confronting with a chemical pregnancy. If you get a faint pregnancy line for a few days and then you get a negative result it is very likely you’ve had an early miscarriage. This is one of the reasons that don’t depend on you so you should see a doctor.