Note: this is not medical advice and you must do your own research yourself. please consult a doctor before utilizing any of the content in this post. I do not accept responsibility for any negative consequences that occur as a result of the information in this post.

as it's becoming increasingly clear that we must secure access to hormones for ourselves, I'm sharing this homebrew procedure I've cobbled together from research. I won't pretend that I wrote this all myself - it's just procedural notes from various sources online. anyone with an extremely basic knowledge of chemistry should be able to follow this procedure using equipment that's easily purchased from online retailers, including Amazon, for not very much money. I've chosen estradiol cypionate here as it has a longer half-life inside the body than estradiol valerate, meaning 1/week injections result in less variability in blood E2 levels. the raw powder can be purchased from alibaba for as little as $500/Kg, in amounts as low as 10g. to put that in perspective, 10g of estradiol is approximately 1000 weeks worth of injections for a single person. a single gram produces two 10mL vials of 50mg/mL estradiol cypionate. this is remarkably cost effective if you have the basic knowhow and can effectively reduce the risk of contamination.

my primary addition is the procedure for sanitization. most sources online assume that estradiol must be handled like testosterone - that the only way to prevent infections when homebrewing it in conditions that don't even come close to cleanroom is to include copious amounts of preservatives (usually benzyl alcohol). however, BA causes an allergic reaction in a small percentage of people, so using large quantities of it is potentially dangerous for anyone who's reactive to the chemical, so alternative/supplemental means of preservation are desirable. after some research, I found that estradiol is actually stable at high temperatures (>200C) - that is, unlike testosterone, it does not break down at the temperatures required to sterilize with heat alone. this is important as in order to adequately sterilize the final product, you have to stick the sealed vial into the sterilizer -- leaving the compound exposed to air just reintroduces the possibility for contamination once the product leaves the sterilizer. I still include benzyl alcohol here because it helps to mitigate the risk of contamination but I plan to reduce it's role in the recipe after further testing. it's hard to eliminate it entirely because it helps make the injectable product move through the needle more readily, but this allergy risk should not go unstated, and it can feel uncomfortable for a bit when injecting as it will induce a mild burning sensation at the injection site, especially as benzyl alcohol levels increase.

with any procedure like this, make sure to do your own testing. spore kits are available online that allow you to intentionally contaminate a batch with identifiable spores, then send the batch to the lab associated with the kit for testing. if the spores are found active in the final product, you know that your heat treatment and preservative use did not adequately eliminate the risk of contamination. I strongly advise making use of one of these services, despite the relatively high cost (cheapest I found came close to $200 total for the testing, including the kit), as an inadequate mitigation procedure can leave you and all the people you give estradiol with the risk of infection hovering over your head. I also recommend sending the estradiol powder into a lab for analysis so you can verify that you actually got the product you attempted to buy - though this can be done more cheaply by injecting yourself with it for a few weeks and getting your blood levels tested. if there are contaminants in the source, you will poison yourself doing this, but if you must save money, there you go.

edit with caveats from the thread that might get lost:

1. injecting anything into your body that wasn't manufactured in a cleanroom carries substantial risk of infection. you're bypassing all but a few of the strongest defenses your body has against both toxins and infections. most of this procedure isn't actually a recipe for making anything - it's a step by step breakdown of how to mitigate that risk as best as possible. however, no matter how well you do, there's always a risk - even if you do exactly the same thing each and every time. that you tested your product once and it came back clean from the lab does not mean it's clean every single time. you can be more sure that you're doing okay on this front by doing consistent testing. wait until you've filled most of the vials and contaminate only the last vial with spores, and send that vial to a lab to be tested after sterilization - and commit to doing this for every single batch.
2. raw materials from Alibaba may just be contaminated or outright lie about what they've sent to you. most of the time, this doesn't happen - regulators in China and the risk of just going out of business help prevent this. but buying something on the gray (or really, any other) market always carries risks. you really should test each batch of raw materials you get to be sure.
3. storing the vials manufactured this way for long periods of time (>2-4 years) is a recipe for infection. low-grade contamination that gets past your testing can build up into a worse problem as time goes on. keep some spore test vials in storage and test one every year to see if active spores have become detectable again.

the low price tag on the materials has a deeply hidden cost in genuinely protecting each other from harm. if "we keep us safe" is to mean anything, anyone undertaking these procedures must take testing seriously and commit to rigor in the validation process. the more you skimp on testing, the more likely you are to hurt people. this procedure and the testing regimen aren't hard to follow. they're quite simple. but simple does not mean they can be undertaken without adequate care. the most difficult part of this is that testing takes time and money - you can't do a spore test without a clean room and that means paying capital to do it for us. same deal with spectra analysis on the raw materials. and all of this requires discipline.