One evening I sat down to take a capsule, and my eyes got stuck over its colours. I started thinking on why my capsule had two colours and why not just one or more than two. Let’s not be puzzled all at once, in this article I will be explaining why medicine capsules has two colours and why are they so vibrant.

The ‘container’ and ‘cap’

Upon staring at the capsule, I noticed that the capsule I was going to consume was not of the same size and so I opened it to have a closer look.

capsule

We can see that the size of the two parts is not the same, one is wider than the other. If you pay more attention, you will notice that one has more material than the other. The one having less content, the shorter one is the ‘cap’ while the wider one is the ‘container’.

However, both can act as a container but generally, the wider part is considered as a container and the shorter one as a cap.

The filling machine decides container and cap

Pill filling machine

At the time of the filling operation, which is done with the help of a capsule filling machine, the body part i.e., a container is placed at the bottom with the mouth up for the material to be filled and after filling, the cap is placed on the container. Therefore, to differentiate the ‘container’ part from the ‘cap’ part, a pill has two colours, which ultimately increases production efficiency.

The pharmaceutical industry usually chooses between common range of colours – V.I.B.G.Y.O.R with black and white and produces tons of medicines, and for the massive distinctive production of capsules, it becomes rather important to go beyond and specifically colour the capsule with different shades of V.I.B.G.Y.O.R.

Now that you know the reason behind your capsule being two-coloured, you will be able to identify which one is the container and which one is the cap.

(Written By- Mahek Nigam)