Why do pill containers have cotton

Have you ever wondered why there's an extra item in each bottle? All you end up doing is throwing it in the trash. It turns out, there actually is some reasoning behind this fluff.

Cotton balls were first used in pill bottles by Bayer, a pharmaceutical company known for their aspirin via Insider. In the early s, many medications came in uncoated tablets that could easily break after bouncing around in the bottle. Bayer didn't want customers to potentially take the wrong amount of medication when piecing together broken bits of aspirin. A tuft of cotton filled in the empty space and kept everything nice and snug until the customer opened the bottle at home.

However, medications changed in the s with the invention of a special coating on each pill that prevented them from crumbling nearly as easily. Although cotton was no longer needed, Bayer didn't remove the fluff from their bottles until Because consumers had grown so used to this filler that they felt something was wrong if their pill bottle was missing it via Mental Floss. Some people believed no cotton meant that their medication had been tampered with while others were under the impression that the cotton helped the pills stay more potent.

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