Tallow first came back into our home as a cooking fat, and we have written about why in our story on cooking with beef tallow. What we did not expect was how naturally it would find its way from the kitchen to the bathroom shelf, and how quickly it would replace the moisturisers we had been buying for years.
Why Tallow Suits Skin
Skin is a living organ that takes in some of what we put on it. Once that idea settled in, we started reading the labels on the bottles in our bathroom with the same care we give the labels in our pantry, and we now hold our body products to the same standard as our food.
Grass-fed beef tallow is rich in fat-soluble vitamins and conjugated linoleic acid, and its make-up sits very close to the oils our skin produces on its own. You can think of it as offering the skin something it already recognises, rather than a long list of ingredients it has to make sense of.
Beef tallow sits remarkably close to the oils our own skin produces, which may be why skin seems to respond to it so well.Mr Wellness
How We Use It at Home
My wife was the first to try it. She began applying a small amount of our homemade tallow balm to her face each evening, and within a few weeks the dry patches she had managed for years settled down.
Since then, a tallow-based body cream has become the everyday moisturiser for the whole family, including the kids. What we like most is that the ingredient list is short enough to read in one breath.
We did try making our own at first, using the same tallow we render for cooking. It worked well enough on the skin, but it carried a distinctly beefy smell that none of us wanted to wear for the day. For ease, we now buy good quality balms made from organic, grass-fed tallow, and they have become a remarkable moisturiser in our house. Whenever skin is dry, rough or irritated, it is the balm we reach for, and in our experience it settles things down remarkably quickly.
One thing to do today: turn over the moisturiser you use most and count the ingredients. Many popular creams run to forty or fifty, while the tallow balm on our bathroom shelf has just three. If yours is closer to fifty, look for a balm made from organic, grass-fed tallow and see how your skin feels after a week.
