Six common mistakes ruin a vial: sterile water in place of bac water, a warm counter, shaking, an mcg and mg mix-up, shared vials or syringes, and starting several peptides at once.
Six failure modes, all preventable
Every item here comes from our own material as a documented common mistake. None of them require expertise to avoid, only knowing they exist.
1. Using sterile water instead of bacteriostatic water
Sterile water has no preservative. A vial reconstituted with it is single-use and must be discarded within 24 hours, because there is nothing preventing bacterial growth after the first puncture.
People make this substitution because both vials are clear liquid labelled "water for injection", and because sterile water is sometimes cheaper or more available.
Use bacteriostatic water for any multi-dose vial. The exceptions on our list are oxytocin, NAD+ and KPV. For each, sources disagree, and Claritide takes the cautious side: sterile water, and 24 hours.
2. Not refrigerating immediately
Peptides degrade rapidly at room temperature. The vial goes back in the fridge after you draw your dose, not after you inject, clean up and finish your coffee.
Ten minutes on a warm kitchen counter, repeated daily for four weeks, is not nothing.
3. Shaking the vial
Shaking creates mechanical stress and foaming that denatures the peptide, reducing or eliminating potency. Swirl or roll gently instead, and 1 to 3 minutes is normal for full dissolution.
This is the most common single mistake, because shaking is the instinctive motion for dissolving anything.
4. Incorrect dosing math
Know your concentration. If you add 2 mL to a 5 mg vial, each 0.1 mL, or 10 units, contains 250 mcg.
The specific trap is the microgram/milligram boundary. 1,000 mcg = 1 mg. Most doses are quoted in micrograms; most vials are labelled in milligrams. A factor-of-1,000 error is not a rounding error.
Double-check before every use, including the units and not just the number.
5. Sharing vials or syringes
A serious infection risk. Vials and syringes are single-user supplies, full stop. This includes partners and family.
6. Starting multiple peptides at once
If you begin three peptides simultaneously and something feels wrong, you will not know which one caused it, and you will have to stop all three to find out, wasting the cycle.
Introduce one at a time, with at least two weeks before adding another. Module 6 covers the full phase framework.
The one about the COA
Skipping the certificate of analysis belongs on this list too. A peptide without one is a gamble with no way to verify purity, identity or the absence of contaminants, and it makes every subsequent result uninterpretable.
The pattern
Five of these six mistakes cost you the vial. One of them, sharing, costs you considerably more.
None require technical skill to avoid. They require knowing the rule exists and then not making an exception for convenience on a Tuesday evening when you are tired and the fridge is across the room.
That is genuinely what protocol adherence is: doing the boring version of the correct thing, repeatedly, when nothing appears to be at stake.