Colours in Pharmaceutical Products

Reasons for the coloring of your pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products:

What is the impact of colored dosage forms in the pharmaceutical industry? Is it only about aesthetics or also patient safety and anti-counterfeiting?

Getting patients to take their medications regularly is one thing. Making sure they can easily distinguish between them is just as important as making it easy and safe for them to take their preparations. If the individual pharmaceutical products are too similar, medication errors can quickly occur. In order to constantly improve patient safety, associations, ministries and the industry are working continuously on the safety aspects of product design to minimize medication errors. In addition to color design, this also involves the shape, taste, branding, packaging and instruction leaflet. All with the aim of making it as safe and as easy as possible for patients to take the medication.

The coloring of tablets can help influence our psychology. Pharmaceutical manufacturers make use of this knowledge to give patients orientation and to strengthen their confidence in the respective drug. This is why sedatives are often colored blue, stomach remedies green, strong painkillers, and cardiovascular preparations red. Depressed patients respond better to yellow-colored tablets.

• Aesthetic reasons. Dietary supplements and cosmetics receive added value through color. They are more attractive and positively influence our sensory perception and our subconscious.
•  Patient safety. Coloring drugs is an effective way to distinguish individual drugs more easily and to be able to recognize different dosages better.
•  Anti-counterfeiting. Give your products a special color, e.g., one that corresponds to your corporate identity. This makes your products more tamper-proof. In addition, you can print lettering or your company logo on the tablet surface.

How the tablet gets its color

The most common methods of coloring oral dosage forms are to color the tablet core itself or to apply a film coating to the core. The latter has the advantage that the tablet core and thus also the active ingredient can be protected from environmental influences (e.g. UV light, moisture). A film coating can also delay the release of the active ingredient and mask bitter tastes. Last but not least, a coated tablet also makes it easier to take, as it is easier to swallow than uncoated tablets.

For both methods, different pigments are available for coloring. For the pharmaceutical industry, stable pigments such as metal oxides or aluminum lakes are suitable. On the one hand, these pigments are very light-stable, have good coverage and are inexpensive, but on the other hand they only allow a limited color range. This is not the case with aluminum lakes, which on the other hand allow a wide range of bright colors, but have poorer opacity than other pigments. Non-synthetic pigments can also be used. Thus, formulation specialists can select the appropriate pigments depending on the application and the desired color. Market trends as well as legal requirements must also be taken into account.

But colors do not only play a role in tablets or capsules. Coloring and the associated possible increase in patient compliance and patient safety can also be achieved with colored creams, gels, chewing gums and other dosage forms.

In addition to coloration, imprints or embossing can also clarify further drug labeling so that the consumer can more easily see which drug it is. These features also promote anti-counterfeiting.

See an overview of the coloring possibilities for pharmaceutical products in the following brochures from Biogrund:
(click the picture to open or download the brochures here)

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See also our category for articles around colors in pharmaceutical products
(click the picture to see our category)

Interested also in the topic of Titanium Dioxide free coating? See here!