What do Ibuprofen pills from other countries look like?

Here are the packages and pills that we have received so far from other countries.

Green from China, hot pink from the Czech Republic, white from Australia, white from Argentina, blue from Australia, orange from Japan, and orange and white capsules from China. Thank you Ben, Iveta and Uli, and Justin for procuring these for us!

I like the hot pink ones the best, but ethically I like the white ones from Argentina the best, because they actually look like medicine rather than something pretty that Simone might mistake for candy (!) Also, all of these except for the Japanese ones come in a blister package (clear plastic with foil on the back), so they are definitely not child-proof. And the Japanese ones come in a glass jar with a regular screw-top lid, so, also not child-proof.

We are doing experiments on these (along with about 8 US brands, including Motrin and Advil). The experiments include exposing them to high heat, high humidity, and light to see if they degrade and what chemicals are present as a result of the degradation. We are already finding some interesting results that we can report on in a scientific journal, which is exciting to us. Corby will have something nice for his resume! However, our instrument (an HPLC), which actually does the chemical analysis, is currently not working so we are on hold for the time being. We can hardly wait for it to be back in working order so we can get lots of data and numbers to start crunching in Excel.

We will report more on some of Corby's specific summer project soon, and show you an example of what our HPLC data looks like.

Please feel free to leave us a comment and let us know if you are reading, and what kinds of questions you have! It is hard for us chemists to think like non-chemists and know what normal people want to hear about.