Deriving association and dissociation kinetics from MD simulations is often nontrivial, and the chosen strategy changes depending on the explored molecular system . Kinetics by classical MD simulations are mostly studied in ligand-receptor systems, where single-molecule experiments are performed on a sole receptor-ligand pair. This setting makes it computationally demanding to derive statistically correct association and dissociation rates . In contrast, self-assembling lipid systems unlock a variety of cluster sizes, shapes, conformations and compositions yielding an abundance of association and dissociation events of free-monomers (ligands) with respect to a lipid cluster (receptor), facilitating the derivation of statistically reliable kinetic rates. We adopted a reaction-based methodology for detecting instances of lipids associating with, and dissociating from pre-micellar clusters. Such transitions were detected and recorded for all employed lipids from all the simulations, noting the composition and size of the involved clusters in each transition. Using this methodology, lipid exit rates were first measured (Figure , Supp. Video 1). This is generally a much simpler analytic measurement than that of entry rates due to it being a first order reaction. Based on previous ligand-receptor studies, we treated regarded the involved cluster as the receptor, its constituent lipid types that may influence the exit kinetics as "modulators", and the leaving lipid as the "probe". A "residence time" was defined as the duration between the first and last contact of the probe with the cluster, and its inverse is defined as the exit rate coefficient (Eq 1). A similar definition of the term is used in the realm of ligand-receptor complexes , and has been discussed in the context of micellar systems as well . In the analysis, we only inspected residence reactions that occurred for more than 1ns in clusters of at least ten monomers, to make sure the probe was fully inserted within a micellar phase before its expulsion.