Coating defect
Orange peel and roughness
A dimpled, matt surface rather than a smooth gloss, most visible under raking light.
Written by the Rglax Pharma technical team, who formulate and manufacture every grade named on this guide at our WHO-GMP works in Tahliwal, Una (drug manufacturing licence NNZ/23/238). Reviewed 3 September 2026. Licences and certificates.
What usually sits behind it
- Droplets drying before they spread and coalesce
- Spray too far from the bed, or atomising air too high
- Inlet temperature high for the dispersion being sprayed
Every cause above is a process parameter, not a property of the material. If you are seeing orange peel and roughness on a grade of ours, send us the run conditions and a retained sample and we will work back from them — start at the contact page.
Read next
- Spray rate calculatorOrange peel is droplets drying before they spread, which is a spray rate the bed cannot take.
- Logo bridgingThe film lifts out of an embossed logo or break line and spans across it, so the debossing goes shallow or disappears.
- Picking and stickingTablets adhere to each other or to the pan, and fragments of film or core pull away, leaving pitted faces.
- Colour variationShade differs tablet to tablet within a batch, or between batches that were meant to match.
- All 7 coating defectsThe whole list, with what each one looks like and the parameter behind it.