Benefits of Tallow Balm
If you’re considering using tallow-based skincare, you’re in good company. Tallow-based skincare has been seeing a revival recently, and for good reason: as people begin to care more about what’s in their skincare, many are realizing that the ingredients in mainstream cosmetics are far from clean or natural. Getting back to basics with simple-ingredient tallow skincare can have major benefits for the health and beauty of your skin.
Crucial Components in Tallow
There are plenty of traditional skincare products focused on delivering vitamins, typically in the form of single-vitamin serums and oils. Tallow naturally contains a range of fat soluble vitamins as well as their activators, helping them actually work for your skin rather than just sitting on top of it.
Vitamin A / Retinol
Beef tallow is a natural source of vitamin A, also known as retinol, which boosts cell growth and stimulates collagen production, helping your skin fight against wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, and other signs of aging like age spots, sunspots, and uneven skin tone. Retinoids also help fight against sagging skin by promoting angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels.
Vitamin D
Tallow also provides a natural source of vitamin D, which, when applied topically, helps fight signs of aging by protecting against phototoxicity, helping your skin handle the effects of sunlight. Vitamin D is also crucial for helping stimulate your body’s natural production of hyaluronic acid, which gives skin a more youthful appearance by making it look plumper and more moisturized.
Vitamin E
The vitamin E in tallow is an antioxidant which helps fight dark spots and inflammation, and also works as a kind of moisturizer, softening your skin and helping to prevent it from losing moisture. You’ll probably notice many lotions and other moisturizers adding in vitamin E for these reasons. Some early research is even beginning to suggest that vitamin E may play a role in sun protection, absorbing some UV rays and reducing the inflammatory response your skin has to the sun’s rays.
Niacin / B3
Niacin, also known as vitamin B3, is an active ingredient in many mainstream skincare products, but is naturally occurring in beef tallow. You likely already get some niacin from your diet through foods like animal products, grains, and seeds, but topical niacin provides an extra boost for your skin. The stratum corneum, or skin barrier, is a protective layer of the skin made up of ceramides, cholesterol, and fatty acids. When we’re young, this layer is strong, but it tends to weaken as we age, leading to wrinkles and other signs of aging. A weak skin barrier means your skin can’t properly retain moisture, leading to dry skin and even complications like eczema. Niacin helps your skin produce all three components of a healthy skin barrier, strengthening your skin barrier and keeping moisture in.
Vitamin K
Finally, tallow contains vitamin K, which has only recently been a breakthrough in mainstream skincare, once researchers learned of its abilities to reduce bruises, improve your skin’s ability to heal, and reverse premature skin aging. Vitamin K also has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, helping to fight acne and inflammation and preventing cellular damage from free radicals. It works together with vitamin A, helping prevent your skin from losing the collagen it generates.
Why Tallow is Cleaner
Arguably as important as what tallow skincare includes is what it doesn’t include. These days, the ingredient labels of mainstream skincare are miles long, and there’s not much oversight keeping toxic ingredients from making their way into your cosmetic cabinet. While you might think that what goes on your skin isn’t as important as what goes into your body, our skin absorbs many of the ingredients we slather on, and they end up in our bloodstream just like the food we consume. In recent years it’s been discovered that many of the ingredients we were rubbing on were a lot more toxic than previously believed: the FDA recently discovered that many common ingredients in processed skincare, among them avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate, and octinoxate, not only get into our bloodstreams, but do so at “toxic levels.” These ingredients have since been found to cause endocrinological disruptions, allergic reactions, and even cancer.
Synthetic fragrance free - Clara and Fritz tallow products are free of synthetic fragrances, using only natural ingredients in our manufacturing. This is because synthetic fragrances, whether in your household products, candles, or cosmetics, are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can pose serious dangers to your health. Research has shown that synthetic fragrance chemicals can cause negative effects for your skin and respiratory system, as well as systemic effects like headaches, asthma attacks, breathing difficulties, cardiovascular and neurological problems. These compounds can also act as endocrine disruptors, which are known to lead to issues like breast cancer and polycystic ovary syndrome, gynecomastia, liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and can be dangerous for babies in utero. Tallow also contains no parabens, which can similarly act as endocrine disruptors thanks to their ability to be absorbed into the bloodstream, or sulfates, which are often too harsh for regular use on the skin.
Finally, our tallow products also contain no artificial colors, many of which, like Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6, have been shown to be potentially cancer causing. While we typically only consider the harmful effects of artificial dyes in our food, these substances are similarly harmful in the products we apply to our skin.
