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This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
On TikTok, it’s disturbingly easy to find videos of influencers reconstituting vials of powdered peptides. In most, influencers hold up a vial of gray-market retatrutide, an unapproved weight loss drug colloquially known variously as GLP-3 (because it adds two extra agonists, glucagon and GIP), reta, and ratatouille. The other supplies on hand are alcohol swabs, syringes, and bacteriostatic water. These kitchen-counter chemists say how easy it is to turn a powdery substance in a bottle into a peptide that can be injected into the body. To figure out dosages, just use an online peptide calculator. The storage instructions are all over the place, but generally boil down to “keep it in your fridge for 30 to 90 days.”
Most tutorials don’t include simple, crucial instructions like “wash your hands” or “disinfect all surfaces.” The vast majority of influencers don’t wear latex gloves. The most anyone does is swipe an alcohol swab over the lids of the retatrutide and bacteriostatic water vials.
When I show these clips to a bona fide pharmacist and compounding specialist, her face falls.
For the last month, I’ve been haunted by a vial of retatrutide in my freezer.
After researching so-called GLP-3s last month, I obtained a bottle through a TikTok influencer’s linktree. The problem with gray-market peptides is you don’t really know what you’re buying. Sites that sell these peptides — whether they’re GLP-1 or others — sometimes say their product is 99 percent pure and post an official-seeming certificate of authentication.
You want to make sure your vendor is the real deal, influencers say. Look for a third-party lab certification. That’s how you know it’s legit. For the vendors I use, the link is in my bio and use my code for a 10 percent discount.
My hypothesis is that my vial of dubiously sourced retatrutide — an unapproved drug that is still undergoing phase three clinical FDA trials — is not, in fact, retatrutide. At least, not the same thing that Eli Lilly is administering in its clinical trials. I figured I’d consult with a pharmacist, find a reputable third-party lab, send off my vial, and bada bing, bada boom, I’d have an answer.
As it turns out, it’s not that easy.
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