Melanotan 2 Dosage Guide 2026: Trials vs Reported Use

The calculator

Four things go in, three come back: the vial size, the volume of water added, the syringe type and a milligram figure are the inputs; the concentration, the matching volume and the reading in syringe units are what the tool returns.

Melanotan 2 dosage chart: every published human figure, with its source

One row per published amount, with the population beside it: every Melanotan II figure below comes from a named study or a published case report, with the people it applied to printed beside it. There is no beginner row and no maintenance row, because the record carries neither.

Read the second column before anything else: five of the six rows carrying an amount give milligrams per kilogram of body weight rather than flat milligrams, so none of those five is a number anyone could copy off a chart. The single flat milligram figure on the list came from an emergency department case report, not from a trial.

One peptide, several spellings: the same molecule is written Melanotan 2, Melanotan II, MT-II, MT2 and melanotan-2 across search boxes, forum threads and vendor listings. The trial literature uses Melanotan II, and everything here applies to all of those spellings. It is a different peptide from Melanotan 1, and the two are separated on our Melanotan 1 versus 2 page rather than here.

The conversion this page will not perform: turning a per-kilogram trial figure into a flat milligram schedule for a stranger. The arithmetic of per-kilogram to milligrams is in the next section, worked at six body weights, so the shape of it is visible without any of those numbers being handed to anyone as a target.

The conversion this page will perform: milligrams into syringe units, further down. That one is division, and it holds whatever the milligram figure is and wherever it came from.

What does 0.025mg per kilogram work out to in milligrams?

A per-kilogram figure is not a dose, it is a rule for making one: the same 0.025mg per kg produces a different milligram amount for every body mass it is applied to, which is why a chart that prints a flat milligram figure has already made a decision the trial did not.

So here is the multiplication, and nothing else: body weight in kilograms times the per-kilogram figure. The table runs the three levels that appear in the 1996 phase 1 across six round weights, chosen because they divide cleanly and make the spread visible.

What the spread tells you: across the range above, the published levels land anywhere from 0.5mg to 3mg in a single injection. A chart that prints one milligram figure for everybody is compressing that whole table into a guess about the reader.

The other thing the table hides, and it matters more: those figures come from a three-person dose-escalation and two ten-person crossover studies, all of them in men, all of them monitored, and all of them stopped by 2000. The arithmetic is exact. What it is arithmetic about is thin.

The one melanocortin in this family that reached an approved label is bremelanotide, and what a regulator was prepared to put in writing about a melanocortin agonist is worked through separately on our page on the Vyleesi approval.

How often was it given, and for how long?

The 1996 escalation, in the paper's own two descriptions: its methods say injections "were given daily (Monday-Friday) for 2 consecutive weeks" on a single-blind alternating-day design, saline one day and MT-II the next, and its conclusion describes the result as tanning activity in humans "given only 5 low doses every other day by subcutaneous injection". The alternating design is what reconciles the two sentences: ten weekday visits, five of them carrying peptide.

The two erectile-dysfunction studies were single-exposure: Wessells 1998 monitored rigidity for a 6-hour period after one injection in a crossover against vehicle, and the 2000 study gave drug and vehicle twice each in the same design. Neither one ran a course, so neither one produces a frequency.

No cycle, no off period, no maintenance phase appears anywhere in the trial record. The longest published exposure is two weeks. Every schedule longer than that belongs to the community, not to a study.

And no registered trial is going to extend it: searched on 2 August 2026, ClinicalTrials.gov returns exactly one record for Melanotan, and that record is not a trial. Its own summary field opens "This example interventional study record describes", which is the registry demonstrating its format rather than a study being run, so no schedule, no participant count and no amount in it means anything. There is no registered Melanotan II trial anywhere in that database.

Which route did the trials use?

Subcutaneous, in all four trial reports: the 1996 escalation and both erectile-dysfunction crossovers delivered MT-II by subcutaneous injection, and the case report of systemic toxicity describes a subcutaneous injection as well. No published trial of this peptide used any other route.

The nasal route exists on the market and nowhere in the literature: a 2025 case report describes a 22-year-old woman who used a Melanotan II nasal spray for tanning and was diagnosed with a mucosal malignant melanoma of the anterior maxilla (Alsabbagh, 2025). The UK regulator addresses nasal sprays directly in its own correspondence, and it does so as a classification question rather than a dosing one.

Why route sits underneath the milligram question rather than beside it: the step from a milligram figure to an actual exposure runs through absorption, and absorption is set by the route rather than by the figure. A PubMed search pairing "melanotan ii" with pharmacokinetics, both as [Title/Abstract] terms, returned 1 record on 2 August 2026, and that record is a mouse imaging study of technetium-labeled analogues rather than a human pharmacokinetic study. There is no published human absorption curve to carry a figure from one route to another.

Where does Melanotan 2 stand with regulators?

United States, the compounding file: FDA's page on bulk drug substances that may present significant safety risks lists Melanotan II under substances "previously in category 2 of the interim policies" whose nominations "were withdrawn by the nominators", and it keeps printing the rationale the agency had identified: compounded drugs containing Melanotan II "may pose risk for immunogenicity for certain routes of administration due to the potential for aggregation or peptide-related impurities", and "Published case reports discuss serious adverse events including melanoma, posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, sympathomimetic toxidrome and priapism". The page was current as of 22 April 2026 when we read it.

United States, the border: Import Alert 66-41, "Detention Without Physical Examination of Unapproved New Drugs Promoted In The U.S.", carries red-list entries naming melanotan peptides, one of them recorded simply as Melanotan II, with a note that the product "is imported as non-human research purposes only and then the unapproved new drug is sold on internet". The alert's published date read 31 July 2026 when we pulled it.

What the July 2026 advisory committee did not do: the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee met on 23 and 24 July 2026 to consider peptides for the 503A Bulks List, and Melanotan II was not among them. The published agenda names BPC-157, KPV, TB-500 and MOTs-C on the first day and emideltide, Semax and Epitalon on the second. Nothing about that meeting moved this peptide.

One alpha-MSH analogue does hold a US approval, and it is not this one: afamelanotide, described in a 2017 review as the only alpha-MSH analogue approved for use in a limited number of medical indications, is marketed as SCENESSE, a 16mg implant under NDA 210797, originally approved on 8 October 2019. Different molecule, different delivery, different indication, and it is the comparison that makes the gap on Melanotan II visible.

United Kingdom: answering a freedom of information request in December 2021, the MHRA stated that between 2011 and 2021 it had received 13 suspected adverse drug reaction reports via the Yellow Card scheme associated with melanotan II, and that it has "repeatedly taken action to remove melanotan products so identified from sale for over 10 years". The same letter records a classification point that is easy to lose: the question turns on the medicinal-product definition rather than on the needle, so "injectable tanning products containing melanotan II are not automatically medicines", and where no medicinal claims are made, nasal tanning sprays "will not generally be regulated as medicinal products".

Australia: the TGA's consumer post of 24 January 2025 states that "Melanotan is not approved for sale or use as a tanning agent in Australia", that "It is illegal to supply tanning products containing melanotan without a doctor's prescription", and that "It is also illegal to advertise melanotan to the Australian public". It names headache, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite and facial redness as the common effects, the risk of serious skin cancers as the one it treats as most concerning, and, for Melanotan II specifically, "reports of increased moles and freckles, kidney dysfunction and swelling of the brain". A media release summarized on the same page, dated 21 May 2026, records 27 infringement notices totalling $101,412 issued to one individual over alleged unlawful supply.

What none of that gives you: a dose. Three regulators have written about this peptide and not one of them has written a label for it, which is the whole reason a per-kilogram figure from 1996 is still the newest number on the chart above.

Where do the internet dosing charts come from?

We are not going to describe pages we have not sampled. What follows on the right is what two peer-reviewed papers describe about this market, and on the left is what the trial record holds, so the gap between them is the finding rather than our opinion of anybody's website.

No figure on this page is offered as yours, and the only human figures anyone can publish are per-kilogram amounts from a three-person escalation that closed a quarter of a century ago.

The mechanical move worth naming: a per-kilogram amount measured under supervision, printed as a flat milligram figure for a stranger, with the per-kilogram step and the supervision both deleted. A conversion that has genuinely been performed changes the number and says what it divided by.

What is in a vial sold as 10mg?

The one published assay, and it is the most useful number on this page: researchers bought Melanotan II vials from three online shops and measured them by liquid chromatography with UV detection at 218 nm plus tandem mass spectrometry on the doubly charged precursor at m/z 513, validated against guidelines for assessing active substances in authorized medicinal products. Every shop claimed its vials held 10mg. The total Melanotan II found ranged from 4.32 to 8.84mg (Breindahl, 2015).

Impurities, from the same measurement: vials from two of the three shops carried unknown impurities of 4.1 to 5.9 percent, and impurities from the third fell below the limit of quantification. Unknown means unidentified, not absent.

What that does to every unit count anyone can calculate: the arithmetic further down divides the vial's stated mass by the water volume. If the stated mass is wrong, the concentration is wrong by exactly the same proportion, and so is the milligram amount that any unit reading delivers.

The spread in that last column is the point: the same water volume and the same unit reading spanned 0.432mg to 1mg across vials sold under one label. What a certificate of analysis can and cannot settle about a number like that is worked through in how to read a peptide COA.

How many units is 1mg of Melanotan 2?

Why this section carries no dose: the arithmetic below runs on a vial size and a water volume, and on nothing about you. The 1mg figure is used throughout because it divides cleanly, not because anything tested it.

The vial size in the table is the one the assay study found on sale: 10mg, which is what all three shops in that study claimed. The water volume is a choice made at the bench, and what it sets is resolution on the barrel rather than strength in the glass.

A fivefold spread on one milligram figure: the same 1mg reads as 10 units on one mix and 50 on another, and the two are indistinguishable until the concentration is named. That is why a bare unit count posted without a vial size and a water volume carries no information at all. The general form of that division, for any vial and any water volume, sits in the reconstitution calculator.

Carrying a trial figure through the same division: 0.025mg per kg on a 70kg participant is 1.75mg, and 1.75mg on the 5mg per mL mix above is 0.35mL, which reads as 35 units on a U-100 barrel. The division is exact. The 70kg is an assumption, and the 1996 escalation is what supplied the 0.025.

One assumption every unit count above is sitting on: the syringe scale. Each figure here is a U-100 count, and the other scale in circulation reads 40 units to the milliliter, so the same printed number means a different volume on it. The two scales have their own page.

What's not known yet?

Still unapproved: Melanotan II is not FDA approved for any indication, and we found no approval for it in the UK or Australian regulator material we read, all of which treats it as an unapproved product rather than a licensed one.

No modern dose-finding of any kind: the escalation that produced 0.01, 0.025 and 0.03mg per kg enrolled three men and was published in 1996. Nothing in the clinical-trial search recorded above has repeated it, widened it, or tested a fourth level in people.

No human pharmacokinetics we could retrieve, so we can point to no published half-life, no published clearance, and no basis for saying what a second injection adds to a first.

No long-term human safety dataset. What exists is a case-report literature, which counts harms that reached a clinician and cannot count exposures that did not, so it can never produce a rate.

Three holes, and none of them is small:

• No controlled test of the tanning use. The pigmentation finding is two subjects in a 1996 escalation, and tanning is what the products carrying this peptide are sold as.
• No published protocol beyond two weeks. The record's longest exposure is ten weekday visits, five of them carrying peptide.
• No verified content in what is being sold. The one published assay we could retrieve found every measured vial below its stated 10mg, the highest of them at 8.84mg.

Any number offered as a fix for those three gaps came from the page offering it, not from the record.

One problem sits ahead of all three, and it is the larger one: the peptide has no approved product anywhere in the material we read, so the vial label is the only specification anyone is working from. Identity, purity, sterility and strength all rest on it, and the one published check we could retrieve found it overstating the mass.

How this page is sourced

Read off the papers and the regulator pages themselves: each figure above was read out of the document it is credited to, and not out of anyone's summary of that document. Abstracts and the regulator pages were retrieved on 2 August 2026.

20 sources: 14 peer-reviewed papers, reviews and case reports, 4 US regulator documents, 1 UK regulator letter, and 1 Australian regulator page.

How the trial-count claims here were tested, because a count is a claim about a whole literature: on 2 August 2026 we ran PubMed's own Clinical Trial publication-type filter for the query melanotan II, which returns 4 records: Dorr 1996, Wessells 1998, Wessells 2000 in Urology, and the 2000 Int J Impot Res paper, which reviews the same 20 men as the two crossovers rather than adding new ones. ClinicalTrials.gov, searched the same day for Melanotan, returns 1 record, and that record is one of the registry's own worked examples: its summary field opens "This example interventional study record describes". A template is not a study, so it is cited nowhere on this page, its identifier is printed nowhere on this page, and it is counted in no figure. Searched for afamelanotide, the name of the other molecule, the same database returns 23 real records, which is what a registered program looks like and is the contrast worth having.

What we could not retrieve, stated rather than hidden: the live TGA website did not respond from our network on 2 August 2026, returning no HTTP status on repeated attempts, so the Australian material is quoted from a dated snapshot of the TGA page in the Internet Archive and is labeled as such in the list below. Nothing on this page is attributed to a document we did not open.

Where the rules behind that live: the standard we hold a citation to, and how we check one, is set out on the methodology page. If a figure here ever needs a correction, the correction is recorded there before it is made on this page.

Last reviewed: 2 August 2026.

1. 1

   Dorr RT, Lines R, Levine N, et al. Evaluation of melanotan-II, a superpotent cyclic melanotropic peptide in a pilot phase-I clinical study. Life Sci. 1996;58(20):1777-1784. doi:10.1016/0024-3205(96)00160-9. PMID 8637402.

2. 2

   Wessells H, Fuciarelli K, Hansen J, et al. Synthetic melanotropic peptide initiates erections in men with psychogenic erectile dysfunction: double-blind, placebo controlled crossover study. J Urol. 1998;160(2):389-393. PubMed lists no DOI for this record. PMID 9679884.

3. 3

   Wessells H, Gralnek D, Dorr R, Hruby VJ, Hadley ME, Levine N. Effect of an alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone analog on penile erection and sexual desire in men with organic erectile dysfunction. Urology. 2000;56(4):641-646. doi:10.1016/s0090-4295(00)00680-4. PMID 11018622.

4. 4

   Wessells H, Levine N, Hadley ME, Dorr R, Hruby V. Melanocortin receptor agonists, penile erection, and sexual motivation: human studies with Melanotan II. Int J Impot Res. 2000;12 Suppl 4:S74-S79. Source for the pooled 20-subject figures and the 12.9 percent severe-nausea rate. doi:10.1038/sj.ijir.3900582. PMID 11035391.

5. 5

   Breindahl T, Evans-Brown M, Hindersson P, McVeigh J, Bellis M, Stensballe A, Kimergard A. Identification and characterization by LC-UV-MS/MS of melanotan II skin-tanning products sold illegally on the Internet. Drug Test Anal. 2015;7(2):164-172. Source for the 4.32 to 8.84mg assayed range against a 10mg claim, and for the 4.1 to 5.9 percent unknown impurities. doi:10.1002/dta.1655. PMID 24771717.

6. 6

   Nelson ME, Bryant SM, Aks SE. Melanotan II injection resulting in systemic toxicity and rhabdomyolysis. Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2012;50(10):1169-1173. doi:10.3109/15563650.2012.740637. PMID 23121206.

7. 7

   Habbema L, Halk AB, Neumann M, Bergman W. Risks of unregulated use of alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone analogues: a review. Int J Dermatol. 2017;56(10):975-980. Source for the dosage-uncertainty sentence, the four melanoma case reports, and the afamelanotide approval framing. doi:10.1111/ijd.13585. PMID 28266027.

8. 8

   Hjuler KF, Lorentzen HF. Melanoma associated with the use of melanotan-II. Dermatology. 2014;228(1):34-36. doi:10.1159/000356389. PMID 24355990.

9. 9

   Ong S, Bowling J. Melanotan-associated melanoma in situ. Australas J Dermatol. 2012;53(4):301-302. doi:10.1111/j.1440-0960.2012.00915.x. PMID 22724573.

10. 10

    Kaski D, Stafford N, Mehta A, Jenkins IH, Malhotra P. Melanotan and the posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome. Ann Intern Med. 2013;158(9):707-708. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-158-9-201305070-00020. PMID 23648958.

11. 11

    Dreyer BA, Amer T, Fraser M. Melanotan-induced priapism: a hard-earned tan. BMJ Case Rep. 2019;12(2):e227644. doi:10.1136/bcr-2018-227644. PMID 30796078.

12. 12

    Peters B, Hadimeri H, Wahlberg R, Afghahi H. Melanotan II: a possible cause of renal infarction: review of the literature and case report. CEN Case Rep. 2020;9(2):159-161. doi:10.1007/s13730-020-00447-z. PMID 31953620.

13. 13

    Gilhooley E, Daly S, McKenna D. Melanotan II user experience: a qualitative study of online discussion forums. Dermatology. 2021;237(6):995-999. Abstract read for the 623 entries, the 205 participants, the January 2016 to October 2017 window and the named themes; the full text is behind a subscription and was not read. doi:10.1159/000514492. PMID 34464955.

14. 14

    Yassin Alsabbagh A, Bhujel N, Singh RP. Melanotan II nasal spray: a possible risk factor for oral mucosal malignant melanoma? Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2025;54(9):806-808. doi:10.1016/j.ijom.2025.03.014. PMID 40210573.

15. 15

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks. Table of substances previously in category 2 whose nominations were withdrawn by the nominators, Melanotan II entry, for the immunogenicity wording and the named case-report categories. Page content current as of 22 April 2026, retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. fda.gov compounding safety-risk page.

16. 16

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Import Alert 66-41, Detention Without Physical Examination of Unapproved New Drugs Promoted In The U.S. Red list entries naming melanotan peptides, including one recorded as Melanotan II. Alert published date 31 July 2026 as displayed, retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. accessdata.fda.gov import alert 66-41.

17. 17

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. July 23-24, 2026: Meeting of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee. Cited for its published agenda, which names the seven substances reviewed and does not include Melanotan II. Retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. fda.gov meeting page.

18. 18

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Drugs@FDA record for SCENESSE (afamelanotide) 16mg implant, application NDA 210797, sponsor listed as Clivunel Inc, original submission approved 8 October 2019, marketing status prescription. Product line reads SCENESSE, AFAMELANOTIDE, 16MG, IMPLANT;SUBCUTANEOUS, prescription. Read on the Drugs@FDA overview page and cross-checked against the openFDA drugsfda endpoint, both on 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. accessdata.fda.gov application record.

19. 19

    Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. Response to freedom of information request FOI 21/1237, 20 December 2021, on Yellow Card reports for melanotan II products including nasal sprays and injections between 2011 and 2021. Source for the 13 reports, the enforcement sentence, and the medicinal-product classification wording. PDF retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. gov.uk publication page, response PDF.

20. 20

    Therapeutic Goods Administration. Don't risk using tanning products containing melanotan. Blog post published 24 January 2025. Read from an Internet Archive snapshot captured 9 July 2026, because the live host returned no response from our network on 2 August 2026; the archived copy also carries the linked media release summary of 21 May 2026 recording 27 infringement notices totalling $101,412. Archived TGA page.