Opening Oestrogel Bottles

Whether it is because you have to rely on DIY-HRT, or because you want to build up a stockpile, just in case the political situation in whatever awful country you are living in further deteriorates, there are good reasons to make the most out of your estrogen. What that means depends on the specific medication you are using, in my case this has almost exclusively been gel. (Yes, I have two flasks of injectable EEn with full injection supplies at home as a kind of “life insurance”, but so far I have thankfully not had to use them. I acknowledge that there are benefits to injectables, but I reject the notion that they are better than gel; I don’t have needle-phobia, but that doesn’t mean that I like needles or that I consider bypassing the skin-barrier by penetrating it as safer than just not doing so.)

In Europe most of the gel produced by “big pharma” comes in pump-bottles in one of two concentrations: 0.6 mg∕g (“Oestrogel”/“Gynokadin”…) and 1 mg∕g (“Estreva”); this is about the former, specifically in the bottles produced by “Besins Healthcare”.

Once the bottles are running out of gel, the pump tends to reset less and less to the full position. At that point I’d recommend to manually pull it back up; at some point the vacuum in the bottle will be so strong that the pump will be pulled back in on it’s own after that. Don’t let that deter you and pull it back up; you can do this a few times even. By pressing it down you can still get small amounts of gel out of the bottle (use your own judgement to guess how much you have gotten out of them at this point). Repeat this until even that approach starts failing.

Once you are there, the last thing to do is to disassemble the bottle and press out whatever gel remains in it. This can be done without tools and without destroying the bottle by following the instructions in the following video. (You can turn the sound of if you want or if it is inconvenient, there are captions.)

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(I apologize for the, especially in the beginning, slightly out of sync audio, I’m not sure what happened there…)

Once you are done enjoy your day with a potentially slightly higher dose of E than normal and relish in the knowledge that you will be able to build a stockpile. 😊

Acquiring Gel

Ideally you should get your gel from your nearby pharmacy based on the prescription that you and your competent endocrinologist agreed upon and be payed for by your health insurance. (Hey, I’m not joking, this actually the situation I am in! Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but it is actually true!)

If for any of a gazillion of reasons you have to rely on DIY-HRT, the situation for gel sadly doesn’t look that great at the time of this writing, with DIYHRT.market only having a rather limited list of offerings.

In addition to them, there is Aibolit with whom I’ve made good experiences, though there are occasionally rumors that they had problems which is why they got delisted from a bunch of sites; I can’t say that I myself am aware of a concrete story where someone did not receive their order and I have it on good authority that they were still actively fullfilling orders as of December 2025; if you want contact information, feel free to contact me directly.

Your next options might lie in your personal network, where people might be aware of providers that are less open to the general public or simply people who have a prescription but don’t use it or at least don’t use it fully. This might even include asking supportive cis people: Maybe your mom is getting into menopause but doesn’t want HRT? Great, as a cis woman she should have a reasonably easy time to get a prescription and can just give it to you.

Lastly, if none of those work, if you want to save money, or if you just want to be even more rad than me, there is of course always the option of mixing your own gel. Though at that point you are going to deal with different bottles anyways, so this page is not relevant for you then. Still, for completeness and because I have no personal experience with this, I shall refer you to the Cutie Cuddle Club and their tutorial in case you are interested. (Alternatively there is also /r/estrogel at least until Reddit does more Reddit-Bullshit. Please just move to Fedi, everyone!) And then you can of course use the hashtag “#DIYHRT” on Fedi, there is a decent chance that someone familiar with the topic (or someone who knows someone who is) sees your post and can help you.

Sharing the Video

I have intentionally licensed this video under CC-BY-SA, so you can share it elsewhere, as long as you observe the terms of that license. Note that major video-plattforms might not allow you to do so because they will require you to sign over rights that CC-BY-SA does not give you. If you host the video on your own site and provide appropriate acknowledgement or share it via Torrent with an appropriate readme, those are fair. Still, I’d ask that you link back to this page and make sure that you also provide all captions and subtitles.

Speaking of subtitles, I at this time only provide English captions, but am considering to add German subtitles; if you want to help out I’d also be happy to take subtitles in other languages, just get into contact with me.