Bodega peptides fail their own label test at about $94 a vial

The test Finnrick brokers is a label claim analysis. Marco Krause, the chief executive of the laboratory that ran the samples for Finnrick, told WIRED: "What we offer is simply a label claim analysis. So you send us what you claim to think it is, and then we run it against a standard and verify whether or not it's the right compound." ^[13] The buyer supplies the guess, the lab checks the guess against a standard, and when the guess is wrong the report says wrong. Krause said what the vials actually held was hard to say ^[12].

Someone who has already injected a vial bought under a sign reading "research use only" wants an identification ^[21]. WIRED got four negatives, plus a note that the samples carried low levels of heavy metals and endotoxins and so probably were not actively harmful ^[8].

Four vials for $376.20 works out at about $94 each ^[24], before the testing fee, and Finnrick told WIRED the results would take a few weeks ^[7]. Jeff Colhoun of the vendor directory Peptide Critic paid for his own round at a different lab, Texas-based Analytical Formulations, which could "not positively identify" the four vials he bought at Smoker's World down the block ^[19][20]. Between them the two buyers had eight vials tested from two shops on one street and got back no confirmed match to any label ^[25].

On the supply side, Finnrick CEO Raphael Mazoyer called WIRED's samples "just duds" ^[14] and pointed to turnkey services that let almost anyone open a peptide business ^[16]. "There are a whole bunch of labels popping up that have the same upstream vendor," he said ^[17]. He also said he cannot be sure what is behind the three-month rise in dud results, partly because his company has been testing more samples as it has grown ^[15]. So the increase is an observation about his caseload. If the shared-supplier explanation holds, checking one brand tells a buyer little about the next label on the shelf, because it may come out of the same tank ^[18].

Both purchases were made in person, and both tests were commissioned by the buyer afterwards ^[26]. No payment processor, online marketplace or hosting platform appears anywhere in that chain. What the reporting does describe is a shop counter, an upstream vendor no one has named, and two consumers paying labs out of pocket.

Anyone who does own a listing surface or a checkout in this category is left with the results a verification step can actually return, and the action each one triggers. In these two rounds there were two results: not confirmed, and not identifiable. Both tell a customer to bin the vial without telling them what they took. Many of the buzziest peptides have never been through the drug approval process, WIRED reports, several are not legal to sell for human consumption in the US, and the evidence for their claimed benefits is thin ^[22].