Hay fever medicine that Tiktokers say ‘grows your bottom’ restricted in France

An over-the-counter hay fever medicine beloved by beauty influencers for its supposed power to make their bottoms bigger has been pulled from pharmacy shelves in France amid widespread misuse.

Young French women on TikTok have been promoting Periactine, an antihistamine used to relieve allergy symptoms, as a painless, quick-fix method for gaining weight in all the right places, particularly the chest and derrière.

One of the side effects of the drug’s main ingredient, cyproheptadine, is a noticeable increase in appetite and weight gain.

One of the earlier peddlers of Periactine as a weight gain shortcut was Poupette Kenza, a French influencer who credited the antihistamine with helping her develop an hourglass figure by putting on half a stone in a month.

Another TikTok user wrote that she gained 9kg, or 1.5 stone, in a month, and captioned her video “Thank you Periactine”.

Many of the users are young women who want bigger breasts and bigger posteriors and who flaunt before and after photos that show off their curvaceous “post-Periactine” figures.

But after catching on to the apparent misuse, France’s national agency for the safety of medicine and health products announced that from July 10 the drug will no longer be sold on open shelves at French pharmacies but will only be available by prescription.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to promote the proper use of medicines, and to prevent their misuse for cosmetic weight gain, we are changing the conditions for prescribing and dispensing cyproheptadine,” the agency said in a statement on Thursday.

“Despite the information measures put in place since 2022, this misuse persists, as do the associated risks. Changes to prescribing and dispensing conditions are designed to limit this misuse.”

Along with stimulating the appetite, cyproheptadine can cause a number of adverse side effects including reduced alertness, drowsiness, constipation, blurred vision and palpitations. The drug is used to relieve allergy symptoms like itchy, watery eyes, runny nose, sneezing and hives.

Experts also point out that weight gain is not localised to specific areas but generally distributed throughout the body.

Cyproheptadine has a history of being abused as a weight gain drug.

A 2016 study found that use of the antihistamine as an appetite stimulant was rampant in the population of Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic, putting women in particular, at risk of obesity.