Beef Tallow in Skincare: Why We Don't Use It (And Never Will)
Someone asks us about beef tallow at least once a week now.
They come into the Medford shop, phone in hand, TikTok video paused mid-scroll. "Have you guys thought about making a tallow balm?" The answer is always the same. No. And that answer deserves more than a shrug, so here it is in full.
What's Actually Happening
Beef tallow, which is rendered cow fat, has grown from a TikTok curiosity into an industry. Market analysts value the global tallow balm market at roughly $280 million in 2025, projected to pass $460 million by 2034. (source: Fortune Business Insights) Two-ounce jars of whipped beef fat routinely sell for $25 to $45. One popular brand calls its balm "the most effective natural moisturiser in the world." That is a real claim, on a real product page, about a jar of cow fat and honey.
The pitch rests on four claims, repeated almost word-for-word across thousands of videos. It's ancestral; your great-grandmother used it. It mimics your skin's natural sebum. It's loaded with vitamins A, D, E, and K. And if you can eat it, you can put it on your face.
Let's take those one at a time.
| The Claim | What's Actually True |
|---|---|
| "It's ancestral. Your great-grandmother used it." | She used it because it was cheap and she had a cow. She also scrubbed with harsh lye soap and thought cigarettes were fine. Old is not the same as good. |
| "It mimics your skin's natural sebum." | True, and not the selling point they think it is. Clogged pores are made largely of your own sebum. Adding a cow's version doesn't fix that. |
| "It's packed with vitamins A, D, E, and K." | The Cleveland Clinic notes that tallow products most likely don't contain enough vitamin A to deliver anything close to what retinol and other vitamin A derivatives do. Plant butters carry vitamins and antioxidants too, with actual research behind them. |
| "If you can eat it, you can put it on your face." | You can eat cayenne pepper. You can eat raw garlic. Your face has opinions about both. Edibility tells you nothing about topical safety. |
What the Research Actually Found
In 2025, the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology published one of the first structured analyses of the tallow trend. (source: Almatroud et al., J Cosmet Dermatol, 2025) Researchers examined 200 tallow skincare posts gathered through standardized searches across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The findings should make anyone with a tallow jar in their cart pause.
More than half the posts showed financial bias, meaning the person recommending tallow had an affiliate code, a brand partnership, or their own product to sell. Skincare brands were the worst offenders at 96 percent. Posts with financial ties recommended tallow 82 percent of the time. And the group least likely to promote tallow? Board-certified dermatologists, at just 7 percent. They were also the group with the smallest financial stake in the answer.
Read that again. The people with the most skin expertise and the least to gain were the least enthusiastic. The people earning a commission on every jar were the loudest. That's not a grassroots movement. That's affiliate marketing with a folksy costume.
The actual science is thin everywhere you look. A 2024 scoping review went hunting for every published study on topical tallow and found only 19 that even qualified for inclusion, and those gave limited, often conflicting results. (source: Cureus, 2024, via Forbes) The Cleveland Clinic puts it plainly: there's no evidence that beef tallow is good for your skin, and it may clog pores and cause breakouts, irritation, or allergic reactions. (source: Cleveland Clinic) The people these videos target hardest, folks with eczema and psoriasis, have compromised skin barriers that make them more vulnerable to reactions, not less.
Here's the part that gets us, as people who list every ingredient we use: tallow has no standard formulation. It's unregulated. What's in the jar depends on the animal's diet, the rendering method, the filtering, and whether anyone tested the finished product at all. Two jars labeled "grass-fed tallow balm" can be completely different substances. And because rendered beef fat smells like rendered beef fat, many tallow products quietly add fragrance to mask it. So the "pure, simple, one-ingredient" alternative to modern skincare often ships with the exact mystery additive its fans claim to be escaping.
The Environmental Question
Tallow comes from the beef industry. Brands market it as a "byproduct" that would otherwise go to waste, but a $280 million market is not a waste stream. It's demand. And demand creates economic incentive for more cattle production, with all the water use, land use, and methane that comes with it. Choosing plant oils over animal fat isn't just a formulation preference. It's a values choice, and we made it a long time ago.
What We Use Instead (And Why)
Emily has been formulating with plant oils and butters since 1998. Not because it was trendy. Because they work, and she watched them work before most tallow influencers were born.
"I started with olive oil and shea butter in 1998 because they were proven, and nothing in 27 years has given me a reason to switch. They do everything tallow claims to do, minus the clogged pores, and nothing has to die for a bar of soap. I don't need TikTok to tell me what works on skin. I've watched it work, on thousands of real people, right here in this shop."
-- Emily Whitlock, Founder & Formulator
Every bar in our cold process soap collection starts with saponified oils of olive, coconut, and sustainably sourced palm, plus shea butter. Shea sits at the bottom of the comedogenic scale, among the lowest of any plant butter; it moisturizes without clogging anything. Our Coconut Vanilla Shea Butter Body Cream is 50 percent shea butter in the oil phase. Not 5 percent. Half. People subscribe to it for years because it works, and it works without you explaining to your roommate why there's rendered beef fat in the bathroom.
Our Actual Position
We're not going to pretend tallow is poison. It's fat. It sits on your skin and slows water loss. So does olive oil. So does shea. So does basically every lipid on earth, and the plant versions come with decades of formulation science, published research, and no warnings from the Cleveland Clinic.
And one more thing, since the whole pitch is that tallow is the rebel alternative to corporate soap: tallow built corporate soap. Check the label on the cheapest bars at any grocery store and you'll find sodium tallowate, which is beef tallow, saponified. Industrial soap makers have leaned on it for a century because it's cheap, not because it's kind to skin. We've made soap for 27 years without a drop of it. The influencers selling $40 jars of ancestral rebellion are pushing the same fat that's in the 99-cent bar they told you to throw away.
We've been making skincare the slow way since 1998. We've watched trends come and go. Charcoal everything. CBD everything. Now tallow everything. The ingredients we chose 27 years ago are the same ones we use today, because they were never trendy. They were just right.
If you want to try tallow, that's your call. We respect your intelligence enough to hand you the numbers and let you decide. But when someone on your phone tells you that smearing beef fat on your face is the secret your dermatologist doesn't want you to know, remember: dermatologists were the least likely group to recommend it and the least likely to profit from the answer. Maybe ask why the person in the video has a discount code in their bio.
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