What's actually printed on peptide vial labels

Nobody audits these labels. There's no standard for what has to appear on one, and on much of what circulates the label is printed by the reseller rather than the manufacturer — so we started counting what they actually say. Every figure below comes from real vials people have scanned with our free label reader — anonymised, no images kept, no idea whose vial is whose. Who prints them →

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Who actually prints these labels

This is the part that changes how you should read everything else on this page, and it took asking people in the community to find out.

The consistent account from sellers and long-term buyers is that much of what circulates in this space does not arrive from the manufacturer with a label on it. The labels are applied further down the chain, by the reseller, on a desktop label printer. We cannot audit anyone's supply chain and we are not going to pretend otherwise — but three things are observable on the labels themselves, and they point the same way.

• The same typo appears across different compounds. On two vials of entirely different compounds — a retatrutide and a tirzepatide — the same phrase is printed with the same two misspellings: “Lyophillizes poweder”, alongside “ResearchUse Only” with the space missing. Two different products manufactured by two different processes would not independently produce an identical error. One label template would.
• Instructions that cannot be followed. Multiple labels read “STORE BELOW 2-8°C”. You cannot store something below a range. It is copy that has been pasted rather than written, by someone not checking whether it means anything.
• No two date formats agree. Across four vials: 20/06/2028, 10/2026, and two partially printed dates running off the edge of the label. None of them state whether the date is an expiry, a manufacture date or a print date.

The reasonable conclusion is not that any particular vial is fake. It is narrower, and more useful: the printed label is a claim made by whoever owned the label printer, not a record produced by whoever made the compound. That includes the date, the storage line and the purity figure.

Which is why the only date worth relying on is the one you write down yourself — the day you received it, the day you opened it, the day you mixed it. Those are facts about your vial. Everything printed on the glass is somebody else's assertion about its past. There is more on what that means for usable windows in our shelf life guide.

Seen something on a label worth adding? Scan it, or send it over — this page gets better the more labels go through it. If you are a reseller who labels differently, we will happily say so here.

Why this is worth counting

A vial with no date on it is a vial you have to take somebody's word about. A vial with no storage line is one you might leave out of the fridge without knowing it matters. And a purity figure printed on a label is a claim, not a test result — it's worth knowing how routinely they appear, precisely because they're unverified.

None of this tells you whether any individual vial is what it says it is. It tells you what the labels themselves habitually do and don't say, which as far as we can tell nobody has measured before.

How it's collected

When someone uses the free label scanner, we keep a handful of yes/no facts about the label: whether there was a date, a storage line, a purity claim, the strength, and which compound it matched. The photograph is never stored, no account is needed, and nothing is recorded that could tie a label back to a person.