This cookie policy explains what gets stored in your browser when you visit, why it is there, and how to refuse anything that is not strictly necessary. It is short because there is not much to declare, which is the point.
The one line version: the only cookies on this site are the ones that make the basket, the login and the age check work. There is no analytics cookie, no advertising tracker, and therefore no consent banner to click through.
On this page
- Every cookie on this site
- Essential cookies
- Counting visits without cookies
- Marketing cookies
- What is not here
- Why we keep cookies minimal
- Your first visit, step by step
- How to control cookies
- Doing it in your browser
- Why there is no consent banner
- How long cookies last
- What the analytics can see
- If you use a blocker
- Changes to this policy
- Auditing this cookie policy yourself
- What we gave up to avoid it
- Shared devices and privacy
- The words used in this policy
- The law behind this cookie policy
- Questions about this cookie policy
Every cookie on this site
Not a category summary, the actual list. This cookie policy can be short because there is very little to declare.
| Type | Do we use it | Can you refuse it |
|---|---|---|
| Essential | Yes, three of them | No, but they store nothing personal |
| Analytics cookies | No. Our analytics uses no cookies at all | Nothing to refuse |
| Marketing cookies | No | Nothing to refuse |
| Third party advertising | No, from any network | Nothing to refuse |
| Session replay | No | Nothing to refuse |
| Social media trackers | No | Nothing to refuse |
Because nothing beyond the essential three is stored on your device, there is no consent banner on this site. That is not a gap in our compliance. It is what compliance looks like when a site does not need your permission for anything.
Essential cookies
These make the site function and cannot be switched off without breaking it. They remember what is in your basket, keep you signed in if you have an account, carry the information a checkout needs to complete securely, and remember that you have passed the age check so you are not asked on every page.
They store no marketing information and are not shared with anyone. Under UK law strictly necessary cookies do not require consent, which is why this cookie policy describes them rather than interrupting you to ask about them.
One of them is worth calling out. The age check cookie is what stops the gate reappearing every time you open a guide. If you clear cookies you will see the gate again, which is the system working rather than a fault.
How we count visits without cookies
We do want to know which pages people read, because that is how we decide what to write next. Several of the longest guides on this site exist because the numbers showed people arriving on a thin page and leaving.
What we do not want is to buy that information by tracking you. So the analytics on this site is self hosted, stores its data in our own database, sets no cookie, and sends nothing to Google or to anybody else. There is no third party involved at any point.
To avoid counting the same person twice in a day it uses a one way hash built from your IP address and browser, combined with a value that changes daily. The hash cannot be reversed, your IP address is never stored, and the daily change means nothing can be followed from one day to the next.
That is genuinely all of it. No profile, no identity, no history, nothing that leaves this server.
Marketing cookies
There are none. We run no advertising, so there is nothing to measure and no pixel to measure it with.
This cookie policy keeps the heading rather than deleting it, so that if that ever changes you can see the category was always declared rather than added quietly afterwards. If we ever did run advertising, a consent banner would appear before a single tracking cookie was set, and this page would say so before the banner did.
What is not here
A cookie policy is more useful for what it rules out than for what it lists. There are no third party advertising pixels on this site, from any network. Nothing here reports your visit to a social platform, and there are no embedded widgets loading trackers as a side effect.
There is no session replay tool recording your scrolling and mouse movements, which is far more common than most people realise. Given the subject matter of this site, none of that would be appropriate, and it is easier to not install it than to promise restraint.
What happens on your first visit
Walking through it in order is the clearest way to show that this cookie policy matches the behaviour, so here is the sequence exactly as it happens.
You arrive. The age gate appears and nothing beyond a session cookie exists yet. You confirm you are over 18 and a cookie records that, so the gate does not reappear on the next page. No consent banner appears, because nothing is waiting on your permission.
The page view is counted, without a cookie and without anything that identifies you. Adding something to your basket sets a basket cookie, because that one is the service you asked for rather than something we wanted.
That is the whole sequence. Three cookies at most, all of them doing a job you asked for, which is a fraction of what a typical online shop sets before you have clicked anything.
How to control cookies
There is no banner to answer, because there is nothing set that you would want to refuse. If you want to clear what is there anyway, your browser does it in a few clicks and this cookie policy is not going to make that difficult.
Clearing this site in your browser settings removes the basket, the login and the age check record. Nothing else is stored, so nothing else is removed, and the site behaves normally afterwards apart from showing the age gate again.
Doing it in your browser
Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies for a single site without touching the rest of the web, and that is the stricter option if you would rather not trust any banner anywhere.
In Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge the control sits under the padlock icon in the address bar for the current site, and under privacy settings for a global rule. Doing it here will only affect the basket, the login and the age check, since those are the only essential cookies this cookie policy declares.
Private or incognito windows discard everything when you close them, which is a reasonable way to browse this site if you would rather leave nothing behind at all.
Why there is no consent banner
Consent under UK law is required before anything non essential is stored on or read from your device. We store nothing non essential, so there is nothing to ask about.
That is worth stating precisely, because the absence of a banner usually means the opposite: a site tracking you without asking. Here it means the analytics sets no cookie, reads nothing from your browser, and runs entirely on our own server. There is no permission for us to request.
If that ever changes, a banner appears before a single tracking cookie is set, refusing will be exactly as easy as accepting, and this cookie policy will be updated before either happens.
How long cookies last
Lifetimes matter as much as categories, so this cookie policy states them.
| Cookie | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|
| Basket | Remembers what you added | The browsing session |
| Login | Keeps you signed in | Until you sign out |
| Age check | Stops the gate reappearing | Up to 30 days |
| Checkout | Carries the order through payment | The browsing session |
That is the complete list. There is no analytics cookie and no consent cookie, because there is no analytics cookie to consent to.
Why this site keeps cookies minimal
Most shops collect everything available and work out later what to do with it. This cookie policy describes the opposite approach, and the reason is specific to what this site is about rather than a general principle.
People read our guides about anabolic steroids, testosterone and hormonal health, and a good number of them would rather that reading was not logged by an advertising network and attached to a profile that follows them around. That is a reasonable thing to want, and the only way to guarantee it is to not install the trackers in the first place.
It costs us something. Without advertising pixels we cannot run retargeting, and retargeting works. This cookie policy is one of the places where the site chooses the less profitable option, and saying so is more useful than another paragraph about how much we value your privacy.
What analytics can and cannot see
Being precise here matters, because a vague description invites people to imagine either more or less than the truth.
It shows us how many times each page was viewed, which site a visitor arrived from, and totals by day. That is genuinely what we use it for: a guide that people land on and immediately leave gets rewritten.
It does not show us your name, your email or your order, and it cannot be joined to an order record. It does not follow you to other websites, because it does not exist on other websites. Nothing this cookie policy permits lets us identify an individual reader of any particular page, and nothing it collects leaves our server.
If you use a blocker
Content blockers and strict tracking protection work normally here and we do not detect them, nag about them, or degrade the site if one is running. There is no wall asking you to disable it.
Because there are no third party requests to block, a blocker has almost nothing to do here, and that is the practical test of whether a cookie policy like this one is honest. Load the site with a blocker open and count what it reports.
Strict modes in Safari and Firefox occasionally interfere with the basket by clearing storage aggressively between visits. If items vanish from your basket, that is usually the cause rather than a fault here, and the fix is to allow cookies for this site specifically.
Changes to this cookie policy
If we ever add a category of cookie, it will appear in the table above and behind a consent banner before it is set, not afterwards. This page changed once already, when the analytics described here moved from a conventional cookie based tool to the cookieless one now in use.
The current version of this cookie policy is always the one on this page. If you want to check whether it matches reality, the browser tools described above will tell you in about thirty seconds, and that is a better assurance than anything we could write here.
The law behind this cookie policy
Cookies in the UK are governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations alongside UK GDPR. In short, anything not strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for needs your consent first, and that consent has to be freely given and as easy to withdraw as to give.
The practical effect for this site is that the strictly necessary exemption covers everything we set, so no consent is required and no banner is shown. The ICO guidance on cookies is the independent version of all this and is worth reading if you want to judge whether a banner you meet elsewhere is compliant. Most are not.
Auditing this cookie policy yourself
Everything claimed here is visible in your own browser, which makes this cookie policy unusually easy to check. Open developer tools, go to the storage or application tab, and look at the cookies set for this domain.
You should see at most three, all named above, and none of them analytics or advertising. Reload the page and the count should not grow.
The network tab is the second check and the more revealing one. Filter it by domain and see where requests go. On this site they go to our own domain and to the font and CDN hosts the pages load from, and nowhere else. A site whose cookie policy does not match its network tab is telling you something.
We would rather publish the method than ask for trust, because a cookie policy is one of the few documents on the internet a reader can fully verify without asking anyone.
What we gave up to avoid the banner
This choice has a cost and it is more honest to name it than to present the decision as free.
A conventional analytics tool would tell us how long people stay on a page, the path they take through the site, which device they used, and whether a visit ended in an order. We have none of that. We know how many times a page was read and where the visitor came from, and that is the whole of it.
We also cannot run retargeting, because retargeting requires exactly the advertising pixels this page says are absent. Retargeting works, and choosing not to use it is money left on the table.
The trade was worth making for one reason. People read our guides about anabolic steroids, testosterone and hormonal health, and a good number of them would rather that reading was not logged by an advertising network and attached to a profile that follows them around. The only way to guarantee that is to not install the trackers, so we did not install them.
Shared devices and privacy
If you use a shared or family computer, the cookies described in this cookie policy will keep you signed in and keep your basket, which is convenient and is also the thing to think about on a device somebody else uses.
Signing out clears the login cookie. Clearing site data clears the rest, including the record that you passed the age check. A private window leaves nothing at all behind when you close it and is the simplest option if discretion matters more than convenience.
Browser history is separate from cookies and this cookie policy has no control over it. Clearing cookies does not clear history, and clearing history does not clear cookies. Both live in the same settings screen in every major browser.
The words used in this policy
Two definitions, because they are used loosely everywhere and that vagueness usually favours the site rather than the reader.
A cookie is a small file a site stores in your browser and can read back on your next visit. Local storage does the same job with a larger allowance and no expiry date, and a cookie policy that discusses only cookies can be technically accurate and still incomplete. This site uses local storage for nothing that identifies you.
Essential means the site cannot provide what you asked for without it, which is a narrow test rather than a convenient one. Analytics is not essential under that test, which is exactly why ours was built to work without storing anything rather than being reclassified as necessary, the dodge most sites reach for.
Questions about this cookie policy
Why is there no cookie banner?
Because nothing non essential is stored on your device, so there is nothing to ask permission for. The analytics on this site sets no cookie at all.
Do you use advertising trackers?
No. There are no third party advertising pixels on this site and nothing reports your visit to an ad network or a social platform.
Why do I keep seeing the age gate?
Because the cookie that remembers you passed it has been cleared, or you are browsing privately. It lasts about 30 days otherwise.
How do I clear what is stored?
Clear this site in your browser settings. That removes the basket, the login and the age check record, which is everything there is.
Can you tell it was me who read a page?
No. The analytics stores no identifier that survives the day and nothing that can be joined to an order. We can see a page was read; we cannot see by whom.
Does this cookie policy apply to the guides as well as the shop?
Yes, to the whole domain. The guides set fewer cookies than the shop does because there is no basket involved, usually just the age check.
Do you use Google Analytics?
No. The analytics is self hosted, keeps its data in our own database, and sends nothing to Google or to any other third party.
Given what this site covers, privacy is a reasonable concern rather than an abstract one, and this cookie policy is the half of it you can verify yourself in a browser window. The other half, what happens once you place an order, is set out separately and is just as short.
Our privacy policy covers what happens at order stage, which is a separate question from this cookie policy and equally short. The ICO is the regulator for both.