How do drug companies pick the colours for pills?

October 28, 2006 1:47 AM

How does colour-coding of medications work? For instance, Prozac is typically the combination of green and white, and the generic brands also perserve this colour. Is there some kind of universal system that pharmaceutical companies adhere to? How are the colours of medications determined?
posted by perpetualstroll to Health & Fitness (13 answers total)

From casual conversations with people in healthcare, I've gathered that there isn't really a system. The manufacturer chooses a color, shape, and so on for whatever reasons make sense to them. Presumably they try to make their products somewhat distinctive, unless they're a generic, in which case they presumably try to look reminiscent of the pill the generic is replacing. The pill color, shape, and markings are specified along with the pill's contents, and there are also catalogs that try to collect this identifying information, but there's no overall scheme of organization or more than a small attempt to coordinate.
posted by hattifattener at 2:54 AM on October 28, 2006

My mother and I both have several different generics that are not the same color as their brand-name versions. There are guides online that show pictures of known generics and brand name pills, such as Wall's Medicine Center. Use the alphabetic guide to find a drug, and click the name. At the top right of each pill's guide is a "Drug Photos" link. That will show photos of that pill by several manufacturers. You will see there really isn't any consistency.
posted by Katravax at 5:19 AM on October 28, 2006

Prozac is typically the combination of green and white, and the generic brands also perserve this colour.

My fluoxetine (generic Prozac) is just plain white...
posted by puffin at 5:22 AM on October 28, 2006

When brining a new (and expensive) drug to market, major pharmaceutical companies will employ an agency to pick a name, shape, and color scheme that both differentiates it in the market and has good connotations to the customers.

The generics generally ape the name-brand to take and edge off of the generic-ness of it, and to keep customer confusion to a minimum. But there's no official system, it's just good advertising.
posted by Ookseer at 6:26 AM on October 28, 2006

Marketing and focus groups ad infinitum. It may seem arbitrary but there is "science" behind it.
posted by FergieBelle at 7:15 AM on October 28, 2006

It's based on how colors affect subconscious emotions. I would guess prozac remains white and green to induce calm, feelings of trust in a pristine object. This is just a guess, but here is a professional opinion.

I know that placebo sleepingpills which are blue are suitable sleep aids for most women, but not most men. For this reason I buy blue generic sleep aids whenever ill (seems to hold true).
posted by shownomercy at 7:31 AM on October 28, 2006

My friend interned as a chemical engineer at a Pharmeceutical company. She said it was marketing that determined the color and shape.
posted by hooray at 8:06 AM on October 28, 2006

Also need to think about trademarks and other intellectual property rights. If a manufacturer can make a pill and/or its packaging distinctive enough the manufacturer can continue to monopolize the market.

For instance, Novopharm made fluoxetine pills a similar colour and the same shape as the Eli Lilly/Prozac counterpart and Eli Lilly sued Novopharm. Eli Lily lost because they failed to prove that consumers associated their distinctive pill with a manufacturer. [more here - pdf]

In another case, Eisai fought to maintain its monopoly over Selbex arguing that the other 12 manufacturers of the generic version were engaged in unfair competition because they too used the same kind of packaging and pill colour/shape as the original. [more here]
posted by squeak at 10:27 AM on October 28, 2006

Somewhat tangental to your question, the way a drug obtains its various names on its way to the consumer happens the following way:

1) A drug company (for instance, Novartis) will develop a compound and give it a generic alphanumeric identifier according to its own internal system (for instance, STI571). They submit this compound to the FDA for drug approval under this alphanumeric identifier.

2) If approved, the FDA will tell Novartis "Yes, we approve this drug STI571, and it shall be called Imatanib!" This is the generic name of the drug even though Novartis is the sole maker at the time.

3) Novartis then gets its marketing department to "brand" Imatinib into something that sounds catchy to doctors and patients. They call the drug "Gleevec" and begin marketing it for prescription to patients with leukemia.

4) Later, when Novartis's patent on Imatinib expires, other drug companies can make the drug and rebrand it as their own without using the name Gleevec. It then becomes much cheaper.
posted by dendrite at 11:57 AM on October 28, 2006 [1 favorite]

Note that the heavy marketing angle to all of this is relatively new. There was activity in this area going back some time, of course, but it was only with the introduction of Nexium, the Prilosec follow-on, that the whole color/shape thing really came to the forefront, and that was in the late 90s.

When they marketed Prilosec it was in the form of a purple capsule - but that predated a serious commitment to form factor in terms of pills. Their patent was expiring, and AstraZeneca was scrambling like crazy to try and convert patients from Prilosec to a very slightly different but still patented formulation they released as Nexium.

So before they lost exclusive marketing rights to Prilosec they really pushed the 'purple pill' angle and then they led in the marketing on Nexium with that angle (originally, "small, purple, different" which it was NOT).
posted by mikel at 8:21 PM on October 28, 2006

No system - it's all marketing. In the best cases of successful product and marketing campaign, a drug will be distinctly identifiable by color.

Nexium - "purple pill"
Viagra - "(little) blue pill"
posted by junesix at 9:16 PM on October 28, 2006

I used to take something that came in 3 common dosages, and the generic was color-coded by dosage in the same way as the name brand. In that case, I suspect it was to avoid med errors.
IIRC, generic Synthroid is also dosage-coded by color, or at least the generic I get is.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 11:03 AM on October 29, 2006

This is not the answer to your question. But there's a sculpture / installation by Damien Hirst, where he reproduced 8,000 (common) pills in three huge glass cases. It's called "The Void" (image here). It's pretty sweet.
posted by zpousman at 7:33 PM on October 29, 2006