Remember the last time you went snooping through your boy/girlfriend’s medicine cabinet? While looking at all their prescription bottles, did you ever stop to wonder why they were all orange – or, were you just too preoccupied with the antifungal cream to notice? All that aside, there’s a good reason why most prescription bottles are orange, and they’ve been that way for many years.
Some items such as milk and medicine will degrade when exposed to light. That’s why they come packaged in a colored container to help prevent exposure and maintain the effectiveness of the product. Back in the day, colored glass was used to hold medicines because plastic wasn’t yet a popular medium used in production. Amber-colored glass was the most inexpensive color to produce, so that’s why most bottles came in that color.
Modern-day pharmacists carried on the tradition of the orange color, and nowadays most people instantly associate an orange cylindrical bottle with medication. The standout color also makes it easy to find in the medicine cabinet. Now, about that antifungal cream…