The page has one of the longest safety notes on the site and I do not think it lands as hard as it should, because it is written calmly.
So, plainly. It acts on the melanocytes. Existing moles darken. New ones appear. Which means it changes the appearance of precisely the thing a dermatologist reads to catch a melanoma early — the asymmetry, the border, the colour, the change over time. All four of the things you are told to watch for, altered by the compound.
That is not "a risk". That is degrading the detection method itself.
Agreed, and it is worse than the general version because of who uses it. This is largely used by people who want to look tanned, which correlates with sun exposure, which correlates with the baseline risk you are now harder to screen for.
The practical consequence, and the one thing in this thread I would want somebody to take away: if you have used it, tell whoever checks your skin. Not as a confession. As clinical information they need in order to read what they are looking at. A dermatologist assessing a changing mole will interpret it differently knowing this, and they cannot know unless you say.
The regulatory record here is unusually explicit too. UK, EU, US and Australian agencies have all issued formal warnings on this specifically. That is not a generic unapproved-substance notice — it is four independent regulators having looked at the same case reports and decided to say something.
The case reports behind those warnings are not only the melanoma diagnoses. Rhabdomyolysis, kidney injury, priapism. Those are in the literature.
And this is the compound where the "but people report it works" argument is at its most useless, because it does work. Visibly, quickly, unmistakably. You can see it in a mirror.
That is exactly why it is dangerous. The effect is immediate and the harm is on a ten-year timescale, and human beings are famously good at weighing those against each other.
That is the asymmetry I was trying to name. Every other compound here has the opposite problem — no visible effect and speculative benefit. This one has a visible effect and a real, documented, delayed harm.
From the believing-things angle: an immediate visible effect is the strongest possible evidence to a person that a substance "works", and it carries no information whatsoever about safety. The two get fused anyway.
It is the same cognitive move as trusting a supplement because you can feel the caffeine in it.
Pinning this in my head as the thread to link when this comes up, which it does.
Nobody here has told anybody not to use it, and I want to be clear that is not squeamishness either — it is that the useful thing a forum can do is make sure the person deciding has the melanoma-screening point and the four-regulator point in front of them. Most places selling it will not mention either.