“Does yellow skin mean liver failure?”

Liver disease is the most common cause, but not the only cause of yellow skin. It is very important to check your eyes, since if it is due to liver disease the whites of your eyes should by yellow tainted as well. If the eyes are not yellow one common cause is ingestion of large quantities of carrots. The bottom line is that if any doubt a fairlin inexpensive lab test done on almost all annual physicals can give a final answer to your question. If you have no insurance Quest labs has a discounted rate for cash patients, and a very inexpensive resource is Life Extension found at lifeextension.com. Your need either a Bilirubin test or sometimes a "panel" of sever al test called Chem 14 or chem12 gives you several tests for same price. By the way, if you are a heavy drinker, I would not wait to have this looked into.,

Jaundice/yellow skin is not how we define liver failure. Yellow skin could be from acute hepatitis, obstruction from stones, cancer, etc. Hard to be be specific with so little information.