Inside the lab: how we compound

A custom formula does not come out of a vending machine. From the moment your diagnostic locks the peptide stack, three things have to happen in order: the actives are weighed (single-tenth of a milligram tolerance), the vehicle is built to your stack's pH window, and the whole thing is sterile-filtered into the brown-glass bottle.

The first 24 hours

The peptides arrive lyophilized — freeze-dried, in a glass vial. Our compounding chemist reads the run sheet, weighs each peptide against a stack tolerance defined for that combination, and dissolves them in cold filtered water with the appropriate buffer. pH is checked twice, by two people, before the actives enter the vehicle.

The vehicle

We have three base vehicles. The rules engine picks based on your stack and your skin's vehicle preference (from the diagnostic). Each is a low-emulsifier oil-in-water with squalane, propanediol, and a polyol. We do not use silicones in any vehicle, not because silicones are harmful but because they create a finish that is at odds with the look the brand is shooting for.

Sterile filter, fill, finish

The combined product is passed through a 0.22 µm sterile filter (the same size used for parenteral pharma), filled into the bottle in a HEPA-filtered enclosure, and dosed with a peptide-friendly preservative system. The bottle is labeled with your formula version and the compounding date.

The 90-day clock starts when you open it

We print "best within 90 days of opening" on every bottle. After that, the actives degrade enough that the formula is no longer doing what it was sequenced to do. We send the next batch on day 80.