If I'm going to talk about pills, you know what kind of reference I'm going to pull right?
Matrix.

So, Neo had to choose between the blue pill that would have put him back to sleep in the boring world of cubicles, and the red pill that would wake him up to the industrial womb factory world.
If you missed that, red pill wakes you up, blue pill makes you sleep!

Now, what colors are the sleeping pills? Yep, be it the package or the pill itself, all you see there is blue! And that's no coincidence; researchers have found that the color of a pill makes a difference in how it works.

In a study, patients were given the exact same sedative, but some received it in a blue pill and others in an orange one. The blue pill takers reported falling asleep 30 minutes faster and sleeping 30 minutes longer than the orange pill takers.

It's another weird manifestation of the placebo effect. How you perceive effectiveness, affects effectiveness.

In a different experiment, subjects were told they were going to get a sedative or a stimulant, when in fact they were getting placebos. Yet 66% of the subjects who took the blue pills reported feeling less alert compared to 26% of those who took pink pills.

And in another study, researchers put fake medicine packages in front of subjects, who picked certain color of boxes over others. It seems warm colors like brown and red were perceived as more potent; green and yellow on the other hand, might as well have been mentos as far as they were concerned.


So, this is why heart medicine are often red or brown, while skin medicines are yellow, sleeping pills blue or green, and painkillers are often white.

Wonder about that!