highlighting a distinguished row in an Oracle Form

I have a Form showing a lot of rows. I would like to do something special to distinguish certain rows, specifically I would like to make certain items in those rows a different color. In principle I should be able to do this with a when-new-item-instance trigger, and the obvious built-in procedure to use is set_item_instance_property. Unfortunately, this procedure does not work for the color properties but only for a very limited list of properties. Is there another way of doing this? Or some trick one can work with set_item_instance_property?