THE NUMBERS / STUDY CONTEXT ONLY
Melanotan 2 dosage: what researchers administered — reported, not recommended
The doses below are facts pulled from published studies. They are not a protocol. Melanotan 2 is not approved for human use, and nothing here tells anyone to use anything.
Read this first
This page describes Melanotan 2 dosage the only way this site will: as study facts. When a number appears below, it's there to record what researchers gave to which species by which route — never as instructions. Melanotan 2 is not approved for human use anywhere, there is no recognized human protocol, and this is not medical advice [1]. A few plain terms first: subcutaneous means injected just under the skin; half-life is how long it takes the body to clear half a dose; mg/kg means milligrams per kilogram of body weight, the way drug doses are scaled in studies. With that framing, here's what the published record contains — and, just as important, what it doesn't.
How much melanotan 2 to inject: the question the studies don't answer for you
There is no established human dose of Melanotan 2, because it was never developed to approval [1]. What exists are study-design facts. The 1996 human pilot escalated subcutaneous doses from 0.01 to 0.025-0.03 mg/kg every other weekday over two weeks and named 0.025 mg/kg/day as the dose for future Phase I work — drowsiness was dose-limiting at the top end [3]. The 1998 erectile-dysfunction crossover used a single 0.025 mg/kg subcutaneous dose [4]. Those are records of what was administered to research subjects under supervision, not a recommendation that anyone replicate them. The unregulated products people actually buy have unknown and variable real content [11], so even matching a study number is impossible by design — you cannot dose accurately from a vial whose contents are unverified.
Melanotan 2 injections: the routes that appear in the literature
Across the research, melanotan 2 injections and other routes have been studied. Subcutaneous injection is the primary route in both the human pilots and in widespread self-administration [3][4]. Intravenous dosing appears in rodent pharmacokinetic and behavioral studies [32]. Direct brain microinjection (into regions like the nucleus accumbens) is how the appetite work in mice was done [7]. Self-administration case reports also document unlicensed intranasal sprays, and one 2026 oral-mucosa case followed 64 days of every-other-day subcutaneous self-injection [31]. Oral dosing isn't practical — bioavailability is very low. None of this is a how-to; it's a map of how the compound has been delivered in studies and in the unregulated market.
Melanotan 2 half life: not actually established in humans
Here's a fact the sales pages gloss over: no validated human pharmacokinetic half-life has been published for Melanotan 2 itself. Statements you'll see online are extrapolated. A rat intravenous study showed rapid, multi-compartment plasma clearance [32]. The closely related linear analog Melanotan I, measured in humans, had a beta-phase half-life of roughly 0.8 to 1.7 hours after subcutaneous dosing. In both compounds, the visible effect long outlasts the peptide: pigmentation persists for weeks because pigment synthesis keeps running downstream after the molecule is gone [13]. So a short blood half-life and a weeks-long tan are both true at once — the peptide clears fast, the pigment doesn't.
Stability and chemistry, for completeness
On the chemistry side, Melanotan 2 is reported as a lyophilized (freeze-dried) powder that's stable kept cold and dry; reconstituted solutions are generally refrigerated per standard peptide-lab practice. The cyclic, lactam-bridged structure gives it more enzymatic resistance than the linear natural hormone [8]. None of this changes the core point of this page: research routes and study doses are documented, a safe human dose is not, and the product sold online can't be dosed reliably because its real content is unverified [11]. For what actually goes wrong in people, read the cited melanotan 2 dangers.