# A Reading Desk, Not a Counter > About Chroma Peptides — Skin & Aesthetics Research Peptides Literature Digest — Chroma Peptides is an independent literature digest on Skin & Aesthetics research peptides — what it publishes, how it cites, and the editorial line it holds on cosmetic versus systemic claims. **ABOUT** What this site is, how to read it, and the one distinction it refuses to let go of. ## What this site is Chroma Peptides is an independent digest of the published literature on a small group of compounds that get filed together under skin and aesthetics: the copper tripeptide GHK-Cu, the melanocortin analogue Melanotan II, and the multi-peptide GLOW blend. It sells nothing. There is no shop, no vendor list, no product recommendation, and no clinic behind it. It is not a source of medical advice and cannot be one — nothing here describes what any individual should do, and no page carries a dose for a person to take. Where a dose appears, it is the dose used in a cited study or documented in a cited case report, reported as a fact about the publication and nothing more. The organising idea is stated in the site's name and repeated on every page: colour, in skin, arrives by two entirely different routes. One is chemistry sitting locally in the dermis. The other is a hormonal instruction reaching the whole body. Marketing treats them as neighbours. Pharmacology and regulation do not, and a reader who holds that distinction firmly has most of what this category requires. ## How to read it Every page follows the same shape. A plain-English summary opens, written to be read by someone with no background in the subject. Below it, the technical account runs at full depth, and nothing is removed from that layer to make room for the plain one. Every quantitative claim carries a bracketed number pointing to the source it came from — percentages, sample sizes, durations, effect sizes, concentrations. The numbers resolve to a single list on the references page, which gives authors, title, journal, year, and a DOI or PubMed link. A source is listed once and referred to by the same number throughout the site. Community-reported effects appear where they are informative, because they are often the only account of what long-term unsupervised use actually looks like. They are always labelled as anecdotal rather than clinical, they never carry a dose or a protocol, and they are kept visibly separate from the cited literature. A recurring, sincere report from many users is evidence about *reports*; it is not evidence about *effects*. Where the literature is thin, this site says so. Where a widely repeated figure turns out to be an extrapolation, it says that too. ## The editorial line One position runs through everything here and is worth stating on its own. A cosmetic ingredient sitting legally on a shelf under an INCI name says nothing about the approval status of the same compound used systemically. And the reverse holds equally: a compound's lack of drug approval says nothing about whether it may lawfully appear in a cosmetic. These are separate registers with separate rules, and collapsing them — in either direction — is the single most common error in how this category is written about. That is why the GLOW blend has a page here despite having no controlled evidence at all. It is the exact point at which a molecule with a legitimate cosmetic register crosses into an injectable one, carrying its reputation and none of its evidence with it. And it is why the Melanotan II page is the heaviest on the site. That compound has real documented harms in the published record — melanocytic change, renal injury, priapism — and a page that treated it as a lifestyle product with an asterisk would be dishonest. A digest that is comfortable to read about everything is not a digest; it is advertising. --- A reading desk for the colour chemistry of skin: Chroma Peptides annotates the published record on copper peptides and melanocortin analogues, and has nothing to sell, nothing to prescribe, and no dose to recommend.