My first China direct order was placed on 22 January, and I even managed to dig out the PayPal receipt: $339 USD.
Looking back, that number makes me laugh , because now I can get 15mg for as little as $84 (or even less). But at the time, compared to paying £95 for one 10mg vial, it still felt dramatically cheaper.
The price had already hooked me.
But my biggest anxiety that week wasn’t money.
It was labels.
The thing I couldn’t let go: labels
I was fixated on having labelled products. It wasn’t about being logical, it was about reassurance. I needed to know what I was injecting. I needed something I could look at and not immediately feel like I’d done something reckless.
So the day I paid, I emailed XCE and asked if they could confirm which product they were sending, because I’d heard their vials weren’t labelled.
The response was… brief:
“Tirz - 10mg, transparent green x1.”
That was it.
No comfort. No explanation. Just: transparent green.
At the time I had no idea how memorable that phrase was about to become.
The waiting game
On 25/1, I asked when it would ship.
I got an automated response.
That was my first real taste of how the grey market feels when you’re new: you go from being a customer to being a detective. Refreshing inboxes. Interpreting short replies like they’re coded messages. Trying to calm your brain down while it insists you’ve just made a terrible mistake.
In the end, I didn’t have to wait long. It was delivered on 31 January, and I only had a couple of days before I was due my next shot.
When it didn’t work, and doubt kicked in
At this stage, I’d been using the UK reseller tirz alongside semaglutide, and I was actually pretty happy with the results as I increased the dose.
Which is why I was so excited to try the XCE tirz. I’d built it up in my head. I had great hopes for it.
With the UK reseller tirz, I could feel it kick in within a few hours, sometimes later the same day. So when I tried the XCE tirz and felt nothing, I was genuinely disappointed. However, I waited until the next day…
Still nothing.
And that’s when doubt set in.
In the end, I had to top up with the UK tirz again, because I wasn’t willing to gamble on it doing nothing for me while my appetite was back.
On 2 February, I emailed Peter. I told him that since I’d been recommended by someone who was very happy with his products, I was wondering if I’d received a bad batch, and I asked whether anyone had tested it.
Peter replied, and my anxiety got worse before it got better
Peter responded promptly and asked me to take a picture of the product so he could check it was the right one.
That did not instill confidence in me. My mind instantly went to: what did I just take if he sent me the wrong product?
The next day, though, he replied that their products are tested, there’s a report on the website, and that if I genuinely thought the product was ineffective, it was returnable, he even gave me a return address in the USA.
He apologised for the inconvenience and hit me with the now infamous “Dear.” At the time it made me feel weirdly special… until I realised it’s basically standard Chinese messaging.
Even reading the email felt surreal.
A return? A refund? In this world?
Then I made the mistake of asking Facebook
At the same time, I discovered a Facebook group where a lot of members seemed to know and post about XCE, so I thought I’d make a simple post asking for advice.
Little did I know how much anger one simple post, about the XCE green-top tirz not working, was about to stir up.
Apparently I was a competitor
Suddenly I wasn’t just a person asking a question. I was being treated like I’d committed some kind of betrayal.
There were jokes and memes everywhere. A lot of people didn’t just disagree, they seemed genuinely offended. Some were acting as if I must be a competitor stirring trouble, or at best, a clueless newbie who shouldn’t be speaking at all.
And then came the line, over and over:
XCE doesn’t sell bad products.
Not “that’s interesting.”
Not “maybe it was a bad batch.”
Just absolute certainty that the product is perfect and the user is wrong.
They also didn’t believe me when I said Peter had offered me a refund without me even asking for one.
That was my first real lesson in grey market culture:
Some communities don’t do nuance, they do loyalty.
The turning point
This was the moment I realised I wasn’t just buying peptides.
I was walking into an ecosystem, one with loyalties, politics, gatekeeping, status games, and an informal hierarchy where a newbie asking a basic question could either get educated… or get humiliated.
The small minority
But here’s what I’ll always remember: in the middle of the noise, there were a couple of people who actually took me seriously.
One of them DM’d me and spent time accessing the PTDS test database to see whether it had been tested or not.
At that point I didn’t even properly understand what PTDS was, I barely knew what Discord was, but I understood something else:
Someone was being patient. Someone was trying to help. Someone was treating me like a person instead of a problem.
And for the first time, I got a glimpse that there really was a system behind the chaos, a place where people were tracking batches, building databases, and trying to turn this wild market into something slightly more accountable.
Not Facebook.
Something else.
My first attempt to find “the real system”
At that stage, I reached out to the admin of the Facebook group to ask her opinion, and to ask for help joining the testing group.
I remember seeing her Facebook name, which had both a male and female name in it, so I had to make a guess… and I assumed she was a man.
She wasn’t.
And she turned out to be one of the most patient people I’ve ever met in this community.
First she asked me some basic screening questions, general things about me, my journey into “research,” how familiar I was with reconstituting peptides, what I expected to gain from the forum/Discord, and how familiar I was with Discord.
I answered honestly:
I wasn’t really sure what Discord even was, and I’d never heard of the online forum she mentioned either.
Orientation, like being back at school
After I passed the first stage, she sent me a series of links to complete, orientation guides, basically, to help me understand the servers so I didn’t feel lost.
I was overwhelmed. I had no clue what half of them were even for.
But I clicked. I joined. I tried.
And still, I couldn’t get my head around how testing worked in practice. Because in my mind, testing meant waiting weeks for results, and what if my product wasn’t even from the tested batch?
It felt like I’d stepped into a world with rules I couldn’t see yet.
My actual “welcome to Discord” moment
After answering all the questions in the modules and passing them, genuinely like being back at school, it was time for my orientation into Discord.
What I can say is this: this person has the patience of a saint.
She did an amazing job of orienting me around Discord. I even checked the timestamps later, she spent a good two hours with me, showing me how to navigate around PTDS, how to join test groups, how to send DMs, and warning me that I’d have to participate in a minimum number of tests.
She even did the same thing for PGB ( the peptide group buy server)
I honestly can’t believe she made it through it with me, because I was completely out of my depth.
Needless to say: to this day, she is one of the kindest people I’ve met in this community.
To be continued.
Because the moment I found my footing on Discord, the whole grey market changed shape. Testing. Databases. Gatekeepers. Egos and power plays. Quiet helpers. Shady characters. Loyal friends and Judases. And suddenly “transparent green” wasn’t a cap colour, it was a warning sign.
Along the way, I made some incredible friends, the ones who stuck by me through thick and thin.
And I met the others too: the ones who stabbed me in the back more than once, and the ones who inspired me, challenged me, and changed me, both for better and for worse.
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