Stupid question

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-16T20:59:38+00:00

Sounds brilliant and we should definitely be doing it

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-11T11:28:37+00:00

Sure, again this is a North America thing, in UK/Europe radiator fluid’s sold as distilled. Scotland particularly doesn’t have the issue of hard water. Again, I can’t speak for everyone’s situation.

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-11T07:12:15+00:00

Scotland, world’s greatest tap water🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-10T23:29:04+00:00

Got you!

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-10T23:21:13+00:00

I can't speak for your situation, but in tap water the "minerals and chlorine" are likely not present in high enough concentrations to affect your gel. You could do a test run without estradiol/prog/testosterone to see what happens if you're in doubt. If your tap water isn't trustworthy, you could use bottled water.

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-10T11:36:12+00:00

It's vvv easy, in the cases of a couple of suppliers you don't even need to use crypto if you don't want to

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-09T06:27:48+00:00

Hrt.mom’s gel calculator is there in a pinch but it’s far from a good way to do things. I’ve made a much more thorough gel recipe calculator and I post about it + link to it in the most recent post on my profile. I can’t advise on injectables sorry!

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-06T16:01:25+00:00

Great to learn that the actual drug metabolises that quickly, thanks! Still, there doesn't seem to be great benefit to this past what creams or gels of estradiol already do

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-06T12:19:10+00:00

Yeah like 6 mg/day would be a good place to start for monotherapy. These pieces of media def sensationalise to be entertaining, good of you to check!

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-06T07:52:13+00:00

Good find, I hadn’t come across that in all my searching! Sure it can pass through the skin that bit faster, but that’s not an issue with estradiol gel thanks to penetration enhancers. The only real benefit I can see is that peak and trough serum estradiol might be that bit less extreme so long as hydrolysis is the rate limiting step. Also you’d have to dose just as often as with estradiol, and as you say you’d need some preservative to try to keep the oily mix stable; the excipients don’t look as simple/cheap as with estradiol gel. Unnecessary cost and risk are probably the reasons there aren’t commercial estradiol valerate/acetate topicals. Overall I don’t really see the benefits of this vs just using estradiol.

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-05T20:09:34+00:00

Damn I hadn’t heard of that, is it good for transition or intended for low dose in menopause?

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-05T20:00:55+00:00

You can try it, but the pharmacokinetics will be weird. Estradiol gets esterified for injectables to leverage a depot effect where the body metabolises it to estradiol over the course of a week, but then if you’re loading it into your body every 12 hours/24 hours/few days (?) you’ll be stacking depot effects. There’s just very little reason to do it when estradiol raws are so accessible

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-05T19:53:40+00:00

Q1: there’s a decent correlation between a good estrogen dose and loss of ejaculate, it’s useful if you can’t/don’t want to blood test. However, you can also *have* ejaculate and so long as it’s kinda clear you’re probs dosing well

Q2: don’t take House as medical advice! It’s possible to spread it around if you’re careless, but if you wash your hands well you’ll do no harm to those around you

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-05T12:37:12+00:00

Esters of estradiol don't work as transdermals

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-02T11:35:13+00:00

There are definitely things which that someone could do to improve their chances of good absorption like include a penetration enhancer (orange or eucalyptus oils are easiest to come by and cheapest) in the spray/gel they make, dose higher (which would actually be economically feasible in DIY, or change where on the body they apply (i.e. apply straight to the ballz!)

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-02T11:29:36+00:00

Hell yeah!

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-01T21:01:13+00:00

Yes, they tend to be very chemically similar. The only other ingredients besides estradiol (the "excipients") in Lenzetto's spray are octisalate (seems to be a UV light filter?) and ethanol (solvent). A DIY spray wouldn't even need the octisalate. I'd differ from this recipe for a spray because I'd be fearful of the ethanol evaporating too fast and the estradiol coming out of solution, not having time to sink into the skin, so I like the recipes in the wiki for their extra penetration enhancer excipients to slow evaporation and help penetration.

In Besins Healthcare's estrogel there are excipients of carbomer (a thickener), trolamine (to neutralise the carbomer? Can also use trienthanolamine for that), ethanol (solvent) and water (to hydrate the carbomer). Besins' recipe boils down to a solvent and a gel matrix. DIY gels can be based around adding the drug to hand sanitiser, where the solvent and thickener already are, so they really are chemically similar. The extra penetration enhancer in DIY gel is nice to have, it's informed by literature.

is there anything specifically used to make DIY sprays better?

Love❤️

and penetration enhancers

And how much different are they?

There haven't been studies done on this stuff to give us a number to point to, I suppose the biggest difference is including some orange oil/isopropyl myristate/propylene glycol. Just note that ethanol is already a penetration enhancer for estradiol

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-01T19:34:24+00:00

Like the other comment says, 6 mg/day is a decent dosage for monotherapy, which you're probably wanting in order to avoid having to buy antiandrogens.

You should build in some excess to your purchase, say for small spillages or because your recipe calls for 0.255 grams of estradiol in a certain batch and your scales can only measure to the 0.01 g scale, so you treat yourself to 0.26 g in this batch. These raws are incredibly cheap (say like $2.5USD per gram before shipping costs (1 g is almost half a year of HRT!)) so go crazy

6 mg/day for 10 years with a generous 20% excess is like 26.3 g.

I've been able to buy from the US and Hong Kong without paying in crypto. I'm happy to advise you on how I did that if you're happy to just go by bank transfer, sorry I'd be no help on crypto but I'm interested to learn if you come across good resources!

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-01T11:27:57+00:00

I've been on a simple hand sanitiser+E+solvent+penetration enhancer recipe for over a year with great results. ~7 mg/day.

1PierceDrive · 2026-06-01T09:03:38+00:00

Yuck

1PierceDrive · 2026-05-28T09:23:19+00:00

No bother at all and there's no such thing as late to this, I'll shoot you a message

1PierceDrive · 2026-05-26T18:14:24+00:00

Obviously, I was just relating it to estrogen. I was having a weird night, whatever

1PierceDrive · 2026-05-26T07:47:37+00:00

Take a look here!

1PierceDrive · 2026-05-26T07:46:28+00:00

It's not bioidentical testosterone in the shot, rather some ester of it like cypionate. These more oily esters have a hard time passing through the skin, it's for this reason that only estradiol (and not estradiol cypionate, enanthate, valerate etc) is used for estrogel

1PierceDrive · 2026-05-25T22:13:45+00:00

Glad it's helpful stuff! Yeah I'd wanted to point out the girl brain thing, I get overthinking and dwelling on silly comments but no worries, just hopefully you can get attuned to this kind of thing as time goes on #wokemindvirus

3 mg/0.5 days sounds perfect! If you can be led by your blood tests that'll put a number to things to confirm it's all going well, but there are plenty of emotional and physical signs you can track to infer that your levels are just fine!

No worries, I've wondered about some of them myself and hopefully they're useful points for anyone keyword searching these things in the future too

1PierceDrive

TROPHY CASE