Lemon Bottle

A trade name. A national regulator’s laboratory could not find the declared ingredients in samples it tested.

Category

Combination

Highest evidence level identified

Evidence not yet assessed

Last scientifically reviewed

20 August 2026

Last regulatory review

20 August 2026

Lemon Bottle is a trade name applied to an injectable solution marketed for dissolving fat, not a defined substance. Its packaging and advertising declare bromelain, lecithin and riboflavin. No mechanism can be described with any confidence, for a reason that goes beyond the usual difficulty with unstandardised mixtures: when the Swiss medicines regulator analysed samples obtained from several sources, the contents did not match the declaration and varied greatly between packs. In one sample the only substance detected was caffeine. In another, none of the ingredients listed on the packaging could be detected at all.

• Compounded preparations

These are fields in which the compound has been investigated. Listing a field is not a statement that anything was demonstrated within it.

• The most serious limitation is not the absence of trials but the absence of a known substance to study. A regulator’s laboratory found the declared ingredients missing and the contents varying between packs, so results from one vial would not describe another.
• No efficacy claim has been scientifically substantiated. The Swiss regulator states plainly that no medicinal effect has been proven and that the quality of the ingredients has not been tested.
• Adverse outcomes are known only through complaint registers and regulator statements, which capture a fraction of what occurs and cannot give a rate.
• Its UK classification is contested. The Swiss position is that a product labelled this way and intended for injection is a medicinal product, unauthorised, and may not be sold, dispensed or used. This record adopts the equivalent UK reading — a product presented for injection to alter the body is a medicinal product under regulation 2 — which places it outside lawful supply without an authorisation.

Regulatory classification is jurisdiction-specific. A compound authorised elsewhere is not thereby authorised in the UK, and a supplier’s description of a substance does not determine how it is classified in law. See safety and regulation for the framework and the authoritative sources.

This is the one entry in the catalogue where the primary hazard is not the pharmacology but the fact that the contents are unknown. A national regulator tested samples and could not find the declared ingredients; one contained only caffeine. Nothing meaningful can be said about the safety of a product whose composition cannot be established and varies between packs, and the reported harms — infections, abscesses, and a case of necrosis — are consistent with unsterile or unidentified material being injected. The Swiss regulator advises that the product should not be used and should be disposed of. The UK pharmacy regulator has separately written to pharmacy professionals warning about the sale of unlicensed, unregulated injectable cosmetic products of this kind.