Rummage through your medicine cabinet in the bathroom and there's a high chance that you'll see one or several of those orange prescription bottles tucked away in there. I only see these things shown on TV since most of our prescription medicine here come in their original opaque bottles or in blister packs.
And because I've been accustomed to seeing these many times in Western shows, it has been embedded in my mind to think that those orange bottles are for pills. However, it never occurred to me to ask why they are colored orange, or amber to be more specific. Reader's Digest asked Jennifer Bourgeois, a pharmacist and health expert, to get down to the real reason why they are orange.
Bourgeois gives three main reasons why the industry standard for prescription pill bottles is the amber color. First, it's to make sure that they remain effective for as long as possible until their written expiration date. We often see storage instructions on the side of pill bottles saying that we should keep the medicine out of direct sunlight. That's why we usually store them in a medicine cabinet, somewhere dry, cool, and dark, to maintain the potency of the medicine. In the same vein, standard pill bottles are colored amber to protect the pills from UV light.
According to Bourgeois, the color orange functions as a barrier to filter out the UV light, so that even if the medicine accidentally sees the light of day, its effectiveness won't be impacted.
Second, it makes sure that the pills are visible. It would be a lot safer to simply store the pills in their original opaque manufacturer bottles, but then, you would have to open the bottle to make sure that you got the right medicines. So, it's much easier to verify the contents of the bottle if it were translucent. Also, it's much faster to know how much you have left if the bottle were translucent.
Finally, they used the amber color as a standard to make medications recognizable. As I mentioned at the beginning, I knew that orange bottles were for pills because that's what I saw on TV. It's a universally recognized symbol that shows something is a prescription medicine. And so, knowing that, anyone would understand that it should be handled with care and not to be trifled with, or not to be left some place where children can easily access them.
Apart from the distinct orange hue, these pill bottles have one other safety feature, and that's their white cap. This was specially designed by a pediatrician, Henri Breault, along with an engineer in order to ensure that children won't accidentally ingest the medicine and get poisoned by them. So, they invented the child-resistant cap, which uses the "palm and turn" technique to open them. Ever since it was created in 1967, the rate of deaths from poisoning by accidental medication ingestion has decreased by more than 80%.
Of course, just because the orange pill bottles are pretty effective in making sure that our medication is safely stored, we shouldn't neglect taking appropriate measures to store it properly away from the sun and from the reach of children. Usually, storing medicine in a cool, dry place is the recommended practice, however, there are certain medication that need to be stored inside the refrigerator, so it's still best to check with your physician, pharmacist, or the indications on the bottle.
(Image credit: Haley Lawrence/Unsplash)