Everyone is injecting themselves and I don't know when that became normal
The peptide rabbit hole I fell down and what I found at the bottom.
If you had asked me six months ago, I genuinely could not have told you what a peptide was. Then sometime around late last year, a friend mentioned to me that she’d started peptides. I did not know what she was talking about and I did not ask because at that point I didn’t really feel that I was missing out on something that everybody else knew already.
And then I was on tiktok and there it was, someone filling a syringe with what I can only describe as a very aesthetic blue liquid, the kind of blue I would have previously associated with a bottle of gatorade or maybe some pool tiles. In the weeks after my feed had been suddenly full of beautiful people explaining their peptide stack to the camera like it was all completely normal.
And so, for some comfort I’d run to the comments, and the comments agreed. Where do you buy them from? What’s your protocol? There were lots of them. It was like reading a completely alien conversation happening on my phone. I watched probably fifteen of these videos in a single evening and by the end I had also absorbed the message that this was just a thing people do now.
What followed was weeks of paying attention and going down the peptide rabbit hole that now I have emerged knowing more about half-lives and injection sites and the difference between subcutaneous and intramuscular than I ever expected or wanted to. And I’m going to share all of it with you, because I think this is one of those moments where something is spreading through culture very fast and it’s worth actually looking at it directly.
Okay, so what even is a peptide?
Peptides are short chains of amino acids, smaller than proteins but made of the same stuff. And what they do is send signals throughout the body. They move through the body telling cells what to do. And based on the peptide you take, the message will differ from heal this tissue, to release this hormone, to produce more collagen, repair this injury, or regulate this process.
Your body already makes thousands of them naturally. This is important, because it’s also the whole basis of the sales pitch. The pitch is that you’re not introducing something foreign into your body, you’re just intensifying something your body already does and making sure the message is heard better.
The part that actually surprised me is that some of the most common medications we already use are peptides. Insulin is a peptide, and that has been keeping people alive since 1922. Ozempic, the GLP-1 drug that has completely dominated the cultural conversation for the past two years, is a peptide. Over a hundred FDA-approved drugs are peptide-based. So when people say peptides are everywhere, they’re technically not wrong.
The difference is that a completely new wave of synthetic peptides, made in labs, sold online, injected at home, injected on camera for tiktok, has moved from a biohacker thing into something really normalised, and that shift happened extremely fast.
The names of peptides
The names of peptides deserve a moment because they are actually very hard to remember and say and yet the people who are deep into this culture say them with such confidence that it creates this strange effect where you feel like the uninformed one in the room which I think is part of how this spreads. The vocabulary alone gives a feeling of belonging, and once you learn the half-lives, you learn which ones you stack together and why, suddenly you are part of a conversation that feels like it has access to information most people don’t have.
How did this happen so fast?!
A few things came together at once. People like Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson and others in the biohacking world, spent years building an audience around the idea that your body is a system you can and should optimise. This spread the message that with the right information, the right supplements, the right protocol can extend both your healthspan and your lifespan. This world had been talking about peptides for years before me and many other people noticed.
Then in late 2024, RFK Jr., newly appointed as health secretary, tweeted that the FDA’s war on public health was about to end, and listed peptides alongside psychedelics and stem cells as things that had been wrongly suppressed.
After this tweet, something that was living in a legal grey area suddenly felt more legitimate.
The market responded immediately to the tweet, and U.S. customs data shows imports of peptides hit $328 million in just the first three quarters of 2025, up from $164 million the year before. That's a doubling in a single year of an industry most people didn’t know much about twelve months ago. Most of it coming from China, and most of it then being repackaged with nicer branding to go on websites that look like very serious skincare brands.
Are they regulated?
So this kind of depends on which peptide you’re talking about. Peptide drugs that have gone through full clinical trials like insulin, the GLP-1 medications Ozempic and Wegovy, and certain cancer treatments, they have been studied across thousands of participants, are prescribed by doctors, and are approved for use in most countries.
The peptides your friend is injecting or that are all over tiktok are a different story. Most of them exist in what I spoke of earlier which is the ‘grey area’. They can’t really be called supplements, but they haven’t gone through the full clinical trial process required to be approved drugs. So they live in the grey area and are sold online with labels that you’ve probably seen that say ‘for research purposes only’, which is a legal loophole that allows purchase for personal use while technically meaning they haven’t been cleared for human consumption.
So right now, if you’re buying injectable peptides online or from a wellness clinic, you are almost certainly buying something that has not been formally approved for human use, may have been manufactured in an overseas facility that you’re not sure you can trust, and offers no guidance on dosing.
One of the most common worries I kept coming across was around a peptide called BPC-157. In animal studies, it sped up the growth of new blood vessels which sounds great for healing an injury, but it also sped up the growth of any tumours in the body. Whether it does the same in humans, we genuinely don't know. The trials haven't been done.
My very serious cultural take
What I think explains why peptides spread through culture the way they have is that we have slowly absorbed the idea that the body is a project. That ageing is a failure rather than a natural fact. And I notice in myself that learning about all of this made me feel genuinely behind. Like I’ve been over here just drinking water and hoping for the best while the baseline of what counts as taking care of yourself just gets more elaborate, more expensive, and more technical.
In Australia, most clinics don’t advertise their prices publicly, which tells you something. Most require a paid blood panel just to begin, then a consultation, then the ongoing cost of the compounds themselves. Which means optimisation, as it always has, is most accessible to people who need it least. Worth sitting with for a moment.
But I also don’t want to be dismissive, because a lot of the people turning to peptides are doing it for very real reasons and don’t all have money to burn. Many of them went to doctors, were told everything looked fine on paper, and still felt awful. When that happens enough times, you go looking elsewhere. I get that. I think most people would.
The skincare side of peptides
For a really long time I was confused about the difference between peptides in skincare compared to the peptides I’m talking about here, so I think it’s worth pointing out that topical peptides in skincare, like the ones in your serums and eye creams and the Rhode lip treatment are regulated, tested, and have decent science behind them. So if you have peptides in your skincare, it is not nothing, but it also is a much different thing from injecting yourself with a compound that arrived in the mail from an overseas lab. Peptides in our skincare has boomed because it has become more advanced and better regulated. They were probably there two years ago and like me, you didn’t clock it, and now suddenly you do, and now they feel like they are everywhere, because they are.
My opinion, for now
I’m staying suspicious of people who speak with total certainty in either direction. Some of these peptides might genuinely help people and some might not. Some might have side effects that we won’t understand for years. What I do have is a strong feeling about is the anxiety we all seem to feel about living in a body that is ageing, and in a culture that has decided ageing is a problem with a solution, and the solution is currently a bottle of liquid and a syringe.
Six months ago I didn’t know what a peptide was. Now I know a lot more than I ever thought I would and that journey happened entirely on tiktok, at night, without me deciding it should. Which is maybe the most interesting part of all of this. You don’t decide to become part of the culture, you just start paying attention, and then suddenly you’re in it. And then a small part of you starts wondering whether you should be doing more for your own body. Which is exactly what they're selling, so I’m trying to remember that.