Lemon Bottle fat dissolving? No thanks!

This is the fat-dissolving jab that has been all over social media, which claims to give amazing results with no downtime – and a lot of you have seen ads for it and have been asking me whether it’s for real. Here are my views.

What are fat-dissolving injections?

Fat-dissolving jabs always sound like total beauty madness (surely, dissolving fat can’t be that easy, can it?) Well, it is and it isn’t. In brief, some substances dissolve fat, such as deoxycholic acid, and there are several brands of injectable fat-dissolvers that are clinically tested and proven and well-known to tweakments providers. You can read more about them and the way they work here.

What is Lemon Bottle?

Lemon Bottle claims to be a fat-dissolving treatment that when injected, produces ‘instant’ and ‘painless’ results. Sounds great but… (you knew there was going to be a ‘but’, didn’t you?)

What’s my issue with Lemon Bottle?

Lemon Bottle is made and widely used in Korea, but it is not licenced for use in UK – not even a CE mark. I can’t find any research about it online. I’ve asked around among my practitioner friends in case I’m missing something obvious about this but they tell me, I’m not. There is no published clinical data to support the product’s claims, even on its own website.

That’s just for starters

The product is classed by its manufacturers as a cosmetic treatment, so it escapes the need for the safety testing that a medical product has to go through and means non-medics can use it. Although there are surgeons and medical aesthetic practitioners who are offering Lemon Bottle, Lemon Bottle is mostly being targeted at, and used by, beauticans, not by nurse- or doctor-led clinics. That’s a red flag for me.

It’s hard to say what’s doing the dissolving, too. Lemon Bottle says it contains ‘all natural’ ‘botanical based’ ingredients, specifically bromelain and riboflavin  – which are not known as fat-dissolvers. It contains no clinically-approved fat-dissolving ingredients such as deoxycholic acid which other fat-dissolving jabs contain.

No pain or downtime – really?

Lemon Bottle claims no downtime – when all the other clinically approved fat-dissolving products that are used by well-trained doctors and nurses cause a good deal of swelling, itching and stinging. If you have them injected in fat under the chin, for example, they’ll make you swell like a bullfrog for a week.

Anything else?

Yes. If you’re tempted to try it out, you need to be aware that if a substance like this CAN dissolve fat, it will also dissolve anything else in its path. Like, muscle, blood vessels, nerve-sheaths…which is why you really do need an expert injector with a medical background and proper training, to put it in exactly the right place.