lacuna's guide to raw estradiol

This is a guide on how to store, prepare, and take estradiol in its pure powdered form :3

Sourcing

I got my estrogen from directly from a chinese pharmaceutical company, but due to such companies increasing their minimum order quantities as more and more transfems order from them, I no longer recommend this approach. Instead, buy from a trans-focused reseller! There are two as of 2024-11-10: allie and teaHRT.

Storage

To keep any drug stable long-term, keep it away from heat, biology, and light. This means your freezer is the natural choice! I'd recommend keeping the estrogen double-bagged, so nothing leaks in or out. If you want to be thorough, use a mylar bag for the outer layer - you can get them on amazon, and they're good at blocking out any form of light or radiation. You should keep the bulk of your estrogen stored in the freezer like this. It should have an extremely long (at least 5 years but almost certainly more) shelf life in there.

Preparation

Next, you'll need to take the estrogen out of the freezer and dissolve it into oil to use it. This allows you to use volumetric dosing, which you need because doses of estrogen are far too small to be measured with any consumer scale.

What You'll Need:

Steps:

  1. measure the capacity of your storage bottle. You can do this by filling it up with water and then emptying it into your measuring cup 👍 Make sure it's fully dry before you proceed.
  2. pick a ratio to dissolve the estrogen at. I've used 1.5 mg/mL, but people online report dissolving up to 2 mg/mL without issue. The more concentrated your estrogen, the less weird oil you need to hold under your tongue every day, and the less often you need to refill your oil bottle. However, dissolving it gets harder, and at some point you'll saturate the oil and be left with a clump of undissolved estrogen at the bottom - this is really bad because then you don't know how much did or didn't dissolve, and therefore you don't know how strong your oil is, defeating the whole point of using volumetric dosing.
  3. ~~ math time ~~
    Call the capacity of your measurement bottle (in milliliters) C. Your ratio, in milligrams per milliliter, is R. Call the amount of estrogen you need to measure out (in milligrams) E.
    E = R x C
  4. Now that you know E, calibrate your scale according to its instructions and weigh out that much estrogen. Put it into your mixing vessel.
  5. Add C milliliters of MCT oil to your mixing vessel. Then boil some water, then pour the boiled water into a bowl, and put your mixing vessel in the bowl so it gets heated. See picture below for the general idea. Glass flask in a larger tub of water
  6. Stir the oil (with the mixing vessel in the hot water) until all the estrogen has dissolved. If you have an immersion blender with a whisk attachment or a handheld milk frother, you can use those to speed up the stirring. At the end, the oil should be clear and not cloudy. This can take a while - dissolving 30mg of estrogen in 20mL of oil took me about 20 minutes. Check to make sure there's no estrogen left by putting the vessel up against a dark background.
  7. Once fully dissolved, let it cool to room temperature and then pour into your storage bottle. Congrats, you're done! Store at room temp or in the fridge, and keep away from moisture and intense light.

Takin' Drugs

First you gotta pick your dose. See the "sublingual E2" row in Table 1 of this paper. These doses represent a good starting point, you'll probably want to adjust your dose at some point as you figure out how your body reacts to estrogen. Note that higher doses of estrogen suppress testosterone production on their own, while lower doses will not do that (as much).

I recommend taking estrogen 3 times a day (8 hours apart) when using sublingual, because sublingual estrogen is absorbed and removed from the body very quickly, so taking it less often can result in an unpleasant daily peak-and-crash cycle. However, some people are okay with just 2x/day, and others feel they need 4x/day to avoid crashes. Experiment!

Finally, know that headaches and even cramps are normal when adjusting estrogen dosage up and down. They should stop after a week at most, and I've found acetaminophen and ibuprofen to be really effective against the headaches. If you have any other questions, I always love to talk about HRT! Just ask me! https://www.reddit.com/r/transdiy is another good resource, but giving places to get medication from is against Reddit policy, so for that you (unfortunately) have to go to the "hrtgen" thread on 4chan's /lgbt/ board.

Once you know how much you want to take at a time, call that amount D (e.g. for 3 mg/day and 3 doses per day, D = 1 mg). Using your small syringe, measure out D / R milliliters of the estrogen oil, and put it under your tongue. Hold it there without swallowing for at least 30 seconds - the estrogen is being absorbed into the blood vessels under your tongue and on the bottom of your mouth via osmosis. The longer you hold the better. Once you're tired of that, swallow and have a little snack to wash out any oil taste. If your oil is cloudy, just make sure to shake before use to evenly distribute the estradiol.

Things To Try Out (i haven't done this)

Things That Don't Work