Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees the federal agencies responsible for the safety of America’s food, medicines, and public health policies. He also reportedly uses a tanning compound that has never been approved for human use, has no established safety profile for cosmetic purposes, and has been linked in medical literature to a condition requiring urgent surgical intervention.
Political commentator Kyle Kulinski, during an episode of Secular Talk, first drew public attention to the practice. Kennedy “takes a peptide that makes his skin darker. It’s like a bodybuilder thing that he does. Lord only knows why he does it,” Kulinski said.
The peptide in question appears to be Melanotan II, a synthetic stuff that stimulates melanin production in the body. Originally investigated as a potential treatment for certain skin conditions, it eventually found an audience in fitness communities for its tanning effects, all while remaining unlicensed and unregulated in most countries.
Kennedy’s reported wellness regimen extends well beyond this one compound. “He takes testosterone at 70 years old and he thinks human growth hormone is good for you,” Kulinski stated. He added that Kennedy “thinks nicotine is good for you,” a position that conflicts sharply with established public health guidance.
Kulinski also noted that Kennedy “is obsessed with mitochondria,” referencing Kennedy’s focus on cellular energy production as central to his health philosophy. The irony of the nation’s chief health official reportedly relying on an unregulated peptide while reshaping the direction of the CDC and FDA has not been lost on critics.
But beyond the political dimension, the medical record on what Melanotan II actually does to the body tells its own story.
Dr. Michael Mrozinski, widely known online as Dr. Michael, began using Melanotan II roughly two decades ago as a young medical student after being introduced to it at a gym. According to sources, a vial cost him roughly 20 British pounds, a small price for what he believed at the time to be an intense tan with no real downside. He now channels that experience into a mission to warn others, particularly younger people, about what the compound actually costs in the long run.
“I did an injection every single night for a week, that was called a loading dose. I felt horrendous after it,” Dr. Michael told. The immediate aftermath was unpleasant.
“About an hour after I did the injections, I would get flushing around my chest and face. My face would feel like it was beetroot red, it was like a beacon, just throbbing. Then there was the nausea as well.”
He also experienced what he candidly described as an “embarrassing” frequency of erections, a well-documented physiological response to the compound. “It was doing a lot more stuff to my body than what it was supposed to be doing,” he said.
The visible transformation, however, was rapid. Dr. Michael went from pale-skinned to appearing, in his own words, South American. “I had black hair, a black beard, my eyes got darker, everything was darker. It was absolutely crazy,” he recalled.
But alongside those visible changes came a quieter, more insidious consequence: a warped self-perception.
“It changes you physically and a lot of people get obsessed with that,” Dr. Michael explained. “You go from looking in the mirror and going, I look like a completely different race right now, to a point in the future where you look at yourself and still think that you could be darker.”
This pattern, sometimes called tanorexia, describes a compulsive preoccupation with skin darkening that persists even when the desired result has long since been achieved. Dr. Michael described the psychological grip of the phenomenon plainly.
“Being tanned is associated with being fit and healthy, so people give me really good compliments. And then when you come off of it, you know you’re not looking yourself, and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is hard.’ So it’s not only the physical, but the psychological stuff – it’s hard. Nobody talks about that. You can look amazing while you’re on it, but everything comes at a cost and you do have to pay that cost at some point.”
Eventually, the physical side effects became too much. “I ended up stopping because the side effects were just too much for me,” he said. “Why are all these other things happening if it’s just supposed to give me a tan and nothing else? It’s doing a lot more to people underneath the surface.”
He used the compound for roughly six months. Getting through the immediate aftermath took about the same amount of time. But 20 years on, the consequences have not fully resolved.
“When I started taking it, I noticed that freckles came out everywhere. Still to this day, they haven’t gone,” Dr. Michael said. Those freckles, he explained, now occupy a troubling medical gray zone. “They don’t look like a melanoma, but they don’t look like normal moles. They look like something kind of in between.”
Perhaps the most alarming consequence emerged during a routine eye examination conducted about two years after he stopped using the compound. A new freckle had appeared in the middle of his left eye, one that had grown noticeably between visits. Eye melanoma, unlike the skin variety, is not caused by sun exposure or genetics. It develops from pigment-producing cells multiplying too rapidly, precisely the kind of cellular activity Melanotan II can trigger.
“There was a new freckle in the middle of my left eye, it was a decent size,” Dr. Michael recalled. He was required to return to the eye clinic every three months for an entire year before doctors confirmed the growth had stabilized and was benign.
“Eventually it stabilized and it was just a mole that had gone through a bit of a growth spurt,” he said. “But I was absolutely petrified.”
He now attends annual eye checks and has been candid about the long-term uncertainty that followed a six-month decision made in his 20s. “People using this will not even know that, unless they’re going to get their eyes checked,” he warned.
“I want everybody online to know the full picture. It’s fun and games while you’re on it, but you can’t be on it forever. There’s going to be a time where you have to come off of it and then that’s when the issues really start for people.”
Among the most medically urgent risks documented in connection with Melanotan II is priapism, a prolonged erection that becomes a medical emergency when it persists beyond a few hours and can result in permanent damage if left untreated.
A case study published in the journal S3xual Medicine in January 2021 documented a 55-year-old man who had been using the compound for more than six years to maintain a darkened appearance. His routine involved a single annual injection before bed, tolerating the nausea that reliably accompanied it.
On one occasion, however, he arrived at a Miami hospital reporting a painful erection that had lasted more than 30 hours. Doctors diagnosed him with acute ischemic priapism.
As the case study noted, Melanotan II, beyond “generating a sunless tan through melanocyte induction,” “can also be used as a s3xual stimulant” and “has been investigated as a possible treatment agent in erectile dysfunction.” In this patient’s case, that property crossed into a medical crisis. Treatment required physicians to drain blood from the area, either via needle or small incision, to restore normal circulation.
While priapism is more commonly associated with certain blood disorders, specific medications and compounds that act on erectile function can also bring it on. This documented case makes clear that a single injection, taken with a cosmetic goal in mind, can produce an outcome requiring surgical intervention.
Melanotan II has no approved clinical use for cosmetic purposes and no long-term safety data. Dr. Michael’s experience offers one of the few extended personal accounts in the public record, and his assessment is direct.
“I won’t be surprised in the future if I did get a little skin cancer,” he said. “But I’m kind of at peace that I’ve done what I can since then to kind of reduce my risk.”
Whether Kennedy has weighed any of these outcomes remains unknown. What is documented is that the official heading America’s top public health apparatus has reportedly been drawn to a compound that carries risks well beyond its cosmetic effects, lacks any approved human application, and has left at least one doctor who used it briefly, decades ago, still attending annual eye clinics to monitor the aftermath.
