The Peptides Trend, by the Numbers
We looked at 18 months of creator content across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, tracking 20 named peptides. What we thought would be one story turned out to be six. Different compounds, different audiences, different brand playbooks, and very different growth curves.
Key takeaways
- Copper peptide (GHK-Cu) is the runaway story of 2026. Mentions grew 9.7x between Jul-Sep 2025 and Apr-Jun 2026. On Instagram alone it went from around 120 mentions per month to nearly 2,000. Cosrx and Aster Wood own the brand conversation, and 72% of the creators posting about it are women.
- Nootropic peptides are the next thing to watch. Semax and Selank grew 6x and 5.3x over the same 9 months. Both skew female (58% and 67% respectively). A “peptides for the mind” narrative is forming, and it lives in a different creator ecosystem than the biohacking-recovery world.
- Longevity peptides make the third rising cluster. MOTS-c up 6.1x, Epithalon up 5.0x. MOTS-c skews male, Epithalon is close to a 50/50 split.
- Gender lines are sharper than we expected. Cosmetic and cognitive peptides skew heavily female. Muscle-building peptides like GHRP-2 and GHRP-6 sit at 85-93% male. The surprise: MK-677 flipped from 76% male in the 18-month baseline to 53% female in Apr-Jun 2026. Women are entering growth-hormone secretagogue content, which was previously a men’s-only room.
- The #peppers TikTok community looks shadowbanned. Posts grew 8x over 18 months, from 78 to 634 per month. Views held or grew. Engagement per post collapsed from 4,517 in Mar 2026 to 464 in Jun 2026, a 90% drop, while total views hit an all-time high. That is the fingerprint of interaction throttling on a codeword-tagged community, not a takedown.
- Beauty brands dominate the top-20 leaderboard because they get @-tagged. Supplement brands (Enhanced Labs, Swiss Chems), biohacking (Strom Sports), telehealth clinics (Marek Health, Amble, BMI MD, Toniik, ZeebaMed) and DTC peptide shops only surface once you filter by specific compound. They win on compound advocacy, not on the tag count.
Which peptides are rising?
For each peptide we compared the last 3 months (Apr-Jun 2026) against the same 3 months from nine months earlier (Jul-Sep 2025), across all three platforms combined. The 9-month gap smooths out seasonality and short-lived spikes. Only one peptide, GHRP-6, went backwards.
Peptide mention growth: last 3 months vs 9 months prior
Bar color reflects the use-case category. Longer bars mean faster growth. Hover a bar for exact figures.
Growth ratio calculated as Apr-Jun 2026 mentions divided by Jul-Sep 2025 mentions, aggregated across three platforms.
Mentions over time, by peptide type: three platforms, three stories
For each platform, we plot the six most-mentioned peptides on that platform over the 18 months. Each surface tells its own story. Instagram is where cosmetic peptides get amplified. TikTok is where GHK-Cu is currently exploding faster than anywhere else. YouTube is the explainer layer, dominated by recovery peptides like BPC-157.
Instagram: monthly mentions by peptide
The six most-mentioned peptides on Instagram over 18 months. GHK-Cu is going near-vertical in early 2026.
TikTok: monthly mentions by peptide
The GHK-Cu curve on TikTok is even steeper than on Instagram, from a handful of mentions to over 1,300 per month.
YouTube: monthly mentions by peptide
BPC-157 and MOTS-c lead on YouTube. The curves are steadier and less spiky than on Instagram or TikTok.
Who is exposed to what? A gender-split analysis
Different peptides live in different creator ecosystems. Here we look at the share of mentions coming from female creators in the most recent quarter (Apr-Jun 2026), sorted by female share. The gap between the current quarter and the 18-month baseline tells us where the gender mix is shifting.
Female share of creator mentions, Apr-Jun 2026
Pink segments represent female-creator mentions, blue segments male. Black triangles mark the 18-month baseline female share so you can see the shift.
The triangle sits where the 18-month baseline female percentage lands. The gap between the triangle and the end of the pink bar is the recent quarter’s shift. Creator gender is drawn from Upfluence data lake demographics.
| Peptide | Category | Female % | Male % | Shift vs 18mo |
|---|
Why are the top-20 brands all beauty companies?
Because the top-20 leaderboard is really a ranking of how often creators @-tag a brand, and beauty is a tagging-heavy category. Supplement, biohacking, and clinical peptide brands earn attention through compound advocacy rather than mentions. Once you split rankings by specific compound (further down), the supplement and medical brands show up immediately.
Per compound: the actual creator and brand landscape
Each card below covers one peptide: its use-case category, its 9-month growth, the five creators driving the most engagement, and the brands that show up in posts referencing that compound. Taken together, these cards show how the peptide category is really a stack of separate markets with different players.
The #peppers TikTok community: a shadowban in real time
Community 8x bigger, engagement 90% smaller.
The #peppers hashtag on TikTok gets used as a codeword to route around peptide-content moderation. Since March 2026 the tag has shown the classic soft-shadowban pattern. Posts keep growing. Unique creators keep growing. Views keep growing. Likes, comments and shares fall off a cliff.
#peppers TikTok: posts, engagement per post and views over 18 months
Left axis: posts per month and engagement per post. Right axis: total views per month.
Engagement per post peaked at 7,121 in Jan 2025 and 5,839 in May 2025. It dropped to 621 in April 2026 and has stayed below 500 every month since. Views hit an all-time high of 5.2M in June 2026.
Top 10 #peppers TikTok creators by follower count
A cross-section view. Many of these accounts are mainstream creators (Jimmy Fallon, food channels) whose engagement holds up much better than that of the peptide-specific creators sitting under the same hashtag. That gap is part of the signal.
| Handle | Followers | #peppers posts | Engagement | Views |
|---|
Cross-compound authority creators
These are the creators who show up in the top-5 engagement ranking for three or more different peptide compounds. In practice, they are the biohacker and medical-pro voices doing the heaviest work of cross-selling the wider category.
| Handle | Archetype hint | Compounds in top-5 | Total engagement across compounds |
|---|
Cross-network lead-lag by sub-trend
For each compound, the ISO week when each platform first crossed 50 percent of its 18-month peak. TikTok tends to break underground compounds first. Instagram amplifies the cosmetic ones once they cross into the mainstream. YouTube runs the explainer layer.
| Sub-trend | Instagram first 50% | TikTok first 50% | YouTube first 50% | Leader |
|---|
What this means
For beauty brands. The GHK-Cu wave is a category-level shift, not a hashtag moment. Cosrx and Aster Wood have set the pace. Copper-peptide skincare, hair, and lip products are the fastest single lane in the peptide category, and 72% of the audience is female. Do not compete on the generic “peptide” term. Compete on the specific ingredient.
For supplement and biohacking brands. The muscle-building peptide category (GHRP-2, GHRP-6, MK-677) sits at 85%+ male and is barely growing. The recovery peptides (BPC-157, TB-500) roughly doubled. The real opening is nootropics. Semax and Selank grew 6x and 5x, sit at 58% and 67% female, and have no dominant brand yet. First-mover position is still available.
For medical and telehealth peptide brands. Marek Health, Amble, BMI MD, Toniik and Bioverse are the compound-specific brands that surface on TB-500, Sermorelin and Ipamorelin. The winning playbook here is compound advocacy through a stable of medical-pro creators (Dr. Trevor Bachmeyer, Dr. Ken Heywood, Jason Poston) rather than raw @-tag volume.
For anyone tracking the trend. Peptides are splitting along three axes at once: cosmetic vs. injectable, male vs. female audience, tagging vs. compound advocacy. Watch the nootropic cluster next quarter. Watch whether the MK-677 gender flip holds. And watch whether the #peppers community migrates to a new codeword once the engagement drop becomes obvious to the creators inside it.
Methodology
Scope. Global. Instagram feed and Reels, TikTok videos, YouTube long-form and Shorts. Study window: 2025-01-01 to 2026-06-30 (18 months). Recent quarter: Apr-Jun 2026. Baseline quarter: Jul-Sep 2025.
Peptides tracked (20). Beauty (tanning): Melanotan. Beauty / skincare: GHK-Cu. Biohacking / recovery: BPC-157, TB-500. Fitness (muscle): GHRP-2, GHRP-6. Fitness / longevity: CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, MK-677. Fitness / weight loss: AOD-9604. Immune / longevity / recovery: Thymosin. Longevity: Epithalon. Longevity / anti-aging: Sermorelin. Longevity / metabolic: MOTS-c. Medical / fat loss: Tesamorelin. Nootropic / cognitive: Semax. Nootropic / mental health: Selank. Sexual / reproductive: Kisspeptin. Sexual health: Bremelanotide, PT-141.
Filter. Case-insensitive regex on lowercased, URL-stripped post text (content_text, TikTok tags, YouTube description). Word-boundary compound match. Hard exclusion of GLP-1 drugs (semaglutide, tirzepatide, retatrutide, liraglutide, Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, GLP-1). DSIP dropped after first pass showed false positives from #openmicsip.
Engagement. Sum of likes, comments, shares and saves per post, with null-coalescing. YouTube comments are null in practice, so YouTube engagement is effectively likes plus views-derived shares. Instagram shares are null.
Rising ratio. Ratio of Apr-Jun 2026 mentions to Jul-Sep 2025 mentions. The 9-month baseline is chosen so the metric captures medium-term trajectory rather than seasonal noise or one-off spikes.
Gender split. Creator gender is drawn from the Upfluence data lake demographics (predicted from bio, name and image signal). Percentages are computed over mention counts, not posts, so a creator posting five times about MK-677 counts five times toward the split. Creators with unknown gender are excluded from the male/female percentages but not from the mention totals.
Brand ranking. Union of affiliate_edges (paid signal) and mention_edges (broad-reach @-signal), with target_type=’unknown’ filtered out on the affiliate side. Brand handles are lowercased and trimmed. YouTube brand data is omitted from the top-20 due to inconsistent post_type coverage.
#peppers community data. All TikTok posts tagged #peppers globally, aggregated monthly. No compound filter is applied; this is the raw hashtag data. The shadowban interpretation is our read of the pattern (posts up, views up, engagement per post down 90%). TikTok has not publicly confirmed a policy change.
Caveats. Mention counts measure creator supply, not audience reach. Rankings are proxies for creator adoption of a compound. Compound categorization is single-label per peptide even when a compound spans multiple use cases (for example, MOTS-c is classified as longevity-metabolic here but also has fitness applications).
Sourcing. Upfluence data lake (prod_bronze) via Trino on Athena, with supplemental analyst-pulled datasets for the 20-compound gender split and the #peppers TikTok community.
