It's less than that, but I believe I also heard that was a bug and that orange items are *supposed* to always grant a skill-up.
As an aside, an orange recipe will never give you 74 skill-ups for 74 attempts because it won't stay orange. The color is indicative of it's relative difficulty for you. If you start off as an alchemist, minor healing potions will be orange for a while. After you gain some skill in alchemy, they'll eventually become yellow, then green, and finally gray. However by the time they become gray, there will be other recipes that you needed those skill points to learn in the first place, and they will more than likely be orange to start off with.
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Only the exceptions can be exceptional.