Beef fat on your face. I get asked about this every week.

My relative asked me to look at a jar of balm her family sells and to say publicly what I thought of it. I agreed on one condition: that I could also write down what it does not do.

Let me start with the reaction most people have, because it is a reasonable one. Rendered beef fat, on your face, in 2026. It sounds like a step backwards.

Beef tallow is composed of roughly forty percent oleic acid, twenty-eight percent palmitic acid and twenty percent stearic acid. Human sebum, the oil your own skin produces, is dominated by the same three fatty acids in broadly similar proportions.

When you apply tallow you are not introducing a foreign material. You are applying something that closely resembles what your skin already makes.

It helps to be specific about the problem.

The outermost layer of your skin is often described as brick and mortar: cells held together by a lipid matrix made of ceramides, cholesterol and free fatty acids. That matrix is what stops water escaping. When it is depleted, water leaves faster than it should. We call this transepidermal water loss, and it is the mechanism behind almost everything people describe as dry skin: the tightness, the flaking, the way it worsens in winter when the air is drier and indoor heating is running.

So the useful question about any moisturiser is not how hydrating it feels in the first minute. It is whether it reduces water loss, and for how long.

Most lotions are predominantly water. To keep water and oil combined in a single stable bottle you need emulsifiers, and emulsifiers are surfactant-type molecules, chemically related to what is in your cleanser.

This creates a tension that is rarely explained to patients. The water phase evaporates within a short time of application, and evaporation can carry away some skin moisture with it. Meanwhile the emulsifier system, applied repeatedly over months, is not doing your barrier lipids any favours.

This is not a scandal and it does not mean lotions are useless. It does explain the extremely common complaint that a moisturiser works for an hour and then the tightness returns.

An anhydrous product, one containing no water at all, sidesteps that entirely. There is no water phase to evaporate and no emulsifier required, because there is nothing to emulsify.

Most tallow balms on the market list honey and never explain it, which I find strange, because it is the more elegant half of the formula.

An occlusive slows water leaving. A humectant attracts and binds water. Tallow is the first. Honey is the second.

On its own, an occlusive seals in whatever is already present, which on genuinely depleted skin may not be much. Pairing a humectant with an occlusive, draw water in and then hold it there, is a standard and sound approach in dermatology. It is what this formula is doing, whether or not the person who inherited the recipe would have described it in those terms.

It is not a treatment. It does not treat eczema, atopic dermatitis, psoriasis or any other skin condition, and nobody should use it in place of care their doctor has prescribed. If you have an inflamed, weeping or infected flare, that is a medical problem and it needs a medical answer, not a balm.

What a well-made occlusive can do is support the barrier on dry, intact skin and reduce how fast water leaves it. That is a modest claim. It is also, for a great many people with chronically dry hands or dry, tight, reactive skin, the thing that was actually missing.

I will also say plainly that there are no substantial clinical trials on tallow in skincare. What exists is compositional data and a long history of use. If you require trial evidence before you put something on your skin, that is a defensible position and you should wait.

— Dr. Alan Whitfield, MD
Board-certified in dermatology.
He reviewed the product and was not paid for a positive opinion.