It seems like the vast majority of medication pills that I’ve seen are naturally white, unless they’re coated of course. Why aren’t any of them (or so few) other colors like green for example?
In: Chemistry
Most medications are made of organic compounds. Most organic compounds a white in color. This is because they don’t have very many multiple bonds and functional groups, meaning the frequencies of light they absorb tend to be outside our visual range.
For a molecule to absorb a photon the energy of that photon must match the difference between a filled orbital and an unfilled orbital in that molecule. In most simple organic compounds the unfilled orbitals are a long way away from the filled orbitals, meaning they would tend to absorb only high energy photons such as in ultraviolet light. We can’t see that though so they all just look sort of white or off-white.
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