Question 1

What counts as a Melanotan result?

Accepted Answer

A result, in the only sense this page can report one, is something an investigator measured and wrote down. On that definition the entire Melanotan record is three studies and thirty volunteers, and all three were finished before 2001. Two of them measured skin colour. The Melanotan-I study enrolled seven normal volunteers (six males and one female) with tanning skin types III or IV (Fitzpatrick scale), a scale that ranks how readily skin burns or darkens. A 1996 pilot gave Melanotan-II to 3 normal male volunteers across a similar fortnight. The third measured something else entirely. Melanotan II was administered to 20 men with psychogenic and organic ED using a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design, where ED is erectile dysfunction. Thirty people spread across two decades is the whole of it, which is small enough that every figure below can be traced back to a named handful of volunteers rather than to a body of work.

Question 2

What can a before-and-after photograph not record?

Accepted Answer

Both tanning investigations reached for an instrument, because skin colour is hard to judge by eye across a fortnight. In the Melanotan-I study, tanning was measured serially using computerized light reflectance, which is a meter held against the skin rather than two pictures held side by side. Then that study went somewhere no camera can follow. Shave biopsies of the forearm taken at baseline and day 21 were analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography for eumelanin content, so its result is a quantity of pigment per milligram of skin rather than a shade. Eumelanin is the brown-black pigment that makes a tan look like one. The 1996 Melanotan-II pilot kept a human judgement in the loop and said so, recording its change as measured by quantitative reflectance and by visual perception. Read that as the honest version of a before-and-after photograph: somebody looking, written down next to a meter reading instead of circulating on its own.

Question 3

Where on the body did the measured colour change?

Accepted Answer

Not everywhere, and the Melanotan-I figures say so twice over. That regimen induced tanning at 3 of 8 anatomic sites including the face, neck and forearm, which read the other way round means five of the eight sites checked did not move at all. The two sites that were biopsied moved by unequal amounts. One week after the course ended, there was a mean 49% increase in forehead skin PTCA levels compared to baseline, taken from three of the seven volunteers. The mean increase in forearm skin PTCA levels was 98% over the same period, and PTCA is the laboratory marker that stands in for eumelanin. One pigment moved and the other stayed put. Forearm pheomelanin expression following MT-I treatment did not significantly change from baseline, pheomelanin being the red-yellow pigment skin also makes. What was measured is a shift in which pigment the skin produces, at some sites and not others, rather than an even change across a body.

Question 4

Did everyone in the studies show a change?

Accepted Answer

No, and each of the three reports counts the people who did. Two subjects had increased pigmentation in the face, upper body and buttock in the 1996 pilot, which leaves the third volunteer outside that sentence and outside every summary built from it since. The erection study counts the same way. In the absence of sexual stimulation, Melanotan II led to penile erection in 17 of 20 men, so three of the men enrolled sit inside the figure without sitting inside the result. Those counts are the first casualty whenever a photograph or a headline summarises an investigation. A study reports how many of its volunteers changed because the ones who did not are part of what it measured, and against a measured record of thirty people, three of them is a tenth of everyone who has ever been counted.

Question 5

Whose skin was measured?

Accepted Answer

Skin that already tans easily, in both investigations. The Melanotan-I volunteers were recruited with tanning skin types III or IV (Fitzpatrick scale), which covers skin that darkens readily and burns little, and the 1996 pilot enrolled 3 normal male volunteers with no stated range at all. That shapes how a percentage should be read. A doubling of forearm pigment was recorded in people whose skin was already producing a good deal of it, and the published measurements do not reach anybody outside those two types. The one person with paler skin in this record was never part of a study. A 20-year-old woman with Fitzpatrick skin type II was referred to a dermatology clinic after a course of Melanotan-II self-injections, and what her report records is a melanoma rather than a tanning outcome. A clinic letter and a trial measurement are different kinds of document, and only one of them was designed to answer the question people are asking.

Question 6

How long did the measured result last?

Accepted Answer

Seven days past the final injection, which is simply as far as anybody looked. The Melanotan-I volunteers were read by comparison of baseline to (1) the end of the daily dosing period, (day 14), and (2) one week later, (day 21), and the forearm biopsy behind the 98% figure was cut on that second date. The 1996 pilot stopped at the same distance, making its pigment comparison 1 week after MT-II dosing ended and recording nothing afterwards. So the longest measured Melanotan result anyone has published is a week old. Whether colour held, faded or deepened past day 21 has not been measured for either molecule among the research behind this page, which is a different matter from a tan being known to last a month. The question was put to a calendar rather than to a volunteer, and a figure in weeks quoted anywhere else did not come from one of these studies.

Question 7

What does the one placebo-controlled result show?

Accepted Answer

Exactly one Melanotan result has a placebo column standing beside it, and it is not about skin. Twenty men took Melanotan-II and placebo in turn, and penile rigidity was monitored for 6 h using RigiScan, a device that records rigidity instead of asking about it. Subjects experienced a mean of 41 min Rigiscan tip rigidity>80% across those six hours. The two columns are what make the result worth reading twice. Increased sexual desire was reported after 13/19 (68%) doses of Melanotan II vs 4/21 (19%) of placebo in that trial, so four doses of plain saline produced the same report from men who knew they were being studied. That 19% is the measured size of everything which is not the compound: expectation, attention, and the act of injecting something. Any single account of a result has that fraction folded into it with no way to subtract it, which is what separates a measurement from an impression rather than anything about how strongly somebody felt.

Question 8

What is on record about results from a Melanotan nasal spray?

Accepted Answer

Every human measurement above came from a needle. The Melanotan-I volunteers were given 10 daily subcutaneous injections, and the 1996 pilot gave its three men shots under the skin from Monday to Friday. A sprayed or inhaled amount has no measured counterpart in this record. The animal work says something sharper than that. In rats, melanotan-II exerted a dose-dependent inducer activity on erection when a vein carried it into the body. In the same study, melanotan-II injected within the corpus cavernosum (1 microg) did not display any facilitator activity, and that site is the shaft of the penis itself. One molecule, one animal, two places to put it, and only one of the two did a thing. A figure attached to a spray is not a smaller version of the injected figures. It belongs to a route that has not been measured in a person among the research behind this page, rather than to a route known to work less well.

Question 9

Why do personal reviews and the measured record diverge?

Accepted Answer

Because a personal account has nothing standing next to it for comparison. A single-blind, alternating day (saline or MT-II), placebo-controlled trial was conducted in 1996, so each volunteer spent half of that fortnight injecting salt water without knowing which day was which. The design exists because a person cannot separate their own change from the season, the mirror and the expectation of a change. Sunlight is the other thing an account tends to carry without declaring it. The young woman in the 2014 report had conducted a 3- to 4-week course of self-injections with MT-II, intending an augmentation of sunbed tanning, so whatever colour followed had two sources and no way of dividing the credit between them. A 2022 review of skin-cancer misinformation lists the promotion of tanning and Melanotan (an unlicensed and untested form of α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone) as safe practices among the commonest themes it found online. Reported experience and measured outcome are not the same object, and the distance between the two is the subject of that review rather than a footnote to it.

Question 10

What has been published about outcomes since 2001?

Accepted Answer

Individual case reports, almost without exception. A case report is written because somebody arrived at a clinic, so it records what went wrong rather than how dark anybody became, and each one describes a single person. A 2026 systematic review of tanning agents gathers them into a single line: unregulated melanotan I and II use has caused serious adverse effects, including rhabdomyolysis, renal infarction, and priapism, meaning muscle breakdown, a blocked kidney artery and a prolonged erection. What that line cannot supply is a rate, because those reports count the people who reached a clinic rather than the people who injected. The documented harms are taken one at a time at the Melanotan safety page. One study is currently enrolling. Melanotan II (MT-II) as an Adjunct to NB-UVB Phototherapy for Repigmentation in Stable Nonsegmental Vitiligo is listed as RECRUITING, NB-UVB being a narrow band of ultraviolet light used in skin clinics. It has reported nothing so far, and when it does it will carry the first measured Melanotan outcome published in a quarter of a century.

Question 11

Does a result from a vial bought online mean the same thing?

Accepted Answer

Every figure above was produced with material the investigators supplied, named and weighed before anyone injected it. That quiet condition sits behind each percentage, and a vial ordered online does not carry it. A 2018 review of falsified medicines places melanotan II among the image-enhancing polypeptides (e.g., human growth hormone, melanotan II) that get copied. It found that multiple reports have namely described the presence of the wrong active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), the wrong dosage or the absence of the API. Two of those three findings mean a reported outcome belongs to something other than melanotan. FDA listings hold three Class II recalls of compounded melanotan injections. One covers Melanotan I 200mcg/mL (2mg/ml), a) 1.5mL-vial, b) 5 mL-vial, Refrigerate. The other two cover a Melanotan II 1 mg/mL (10 mL) Injection and a 10mg presentation, each pulled for a sterility failure. Those papers say how a batch was made rather than what it did to anybody. An outcome reported from a vial nobody checked is an outcome with an unknown cause.

Melanotan: reported results by outcome