There is a LOT of tallow on the interwebs right now.
Tallow balms, tallow face creams, tallow body butters... tallow products marketed like rendered beef fat has somehow been rediscovered as the missing link in modern skincare.
Hell, we use beef tallow, too, and we have for a long time. We just use it where we think it makes the most sense: in soap.
TLDR
We use beef tallow because it helps us make the kind of soap we want to make: hard, long-lasting bars with rich, creamy lather and a cleansing profile that doesn’t need to feel aggressive to prove it worked. We source it locally, render it ourselves, and use it intentionally. We don't believe tallow is the answer to every skincare question- sometimes the right ingredient is the right ingredient for one particular job, and sometimes a cow belongs in the shower, not on your face all afternoon.
What tallow does really well in soap
Beef tallow has a fatty acid profile that makes it genuinely useful in cold-process soapmaking. It's naturally rich in palmitic, stearic, and oleic fatty acids, which help produce a bar that's hard, slow-wearing, and capable of producing a dense, creamy lather- which is awesome, because that's exactly what we want from it.
In our tallow soaps, the beef fat isn't just melted into a bar and left there. It undergoes saponification: the fats react with sodium hydroxide (lye) to form soap. The finished soap is chemically different from the rendered fat we started with. That distinction matters.
Why tallow works for us
Our tallow starts with beef fat locally sourced in Oklahoma, then rendered and triple-filtered/cleaned by hand (by us, not by a factory somewhere) before it ever gets near a soap batch. We use it because of what it contributes to the finished bar- not because “tallow” happens to be having a moment online.
Why we use so much tallow
Simply put, we use up to 75% tallow in our soap because we want a bar that cleans well without making aggressive cleansing its whole personality.
Using coconut oil at high rates in soap is completely understandable since it does make a hard bar with scrum-fluffity-umptious lather. Above all else, coconut oil is fantastic in soap for one very specific reason: it cleans like hell.
When coconut oil is turned into soap, its fatty acid profile contributes strong cleansing ability and big, fluffy lather- great qualities for your soap to have. The downside is that “very effective cleanser” can become too effective.
Cleansers work partly by helping lift oils and other hydrophobic (wants less to do with water than their ex) material from the skin so they can be rinsed away, including dirt and excess sebum. Sounds awesome, right? Soap doing soap things? The problem comes when aggressive cleansing (like you get from coconut oil soap) also removes some of the skin’s own lipids and other components of the outer barrier.
Research on skin cleansing shows that surfactants can extract those skin lipids and natural moisturizing components and contribute to dryness, irritation, and that familiar post-wash feeling of tightness. You know the feeling: so fresh and so clean clean, but also dry, tight, squeaky, and vaguely betrayed by your own shower.
Coconut oil itself isn’t inherently bad. It's actually incredibly useful in the right soap formula. We just don’t want to rely on a large amount of it to make our bars perform.
Tallow gives us a hard bar that holds up better in your damp shower dungeon, along with that creamy, stable lather without building the entire formula around maximum degreasing power. It's your BODY, not the floor around a fast-food kitchen's deep fryer.
The goal isn’t to make soap that cleans less effectively. It’s to make soap that cleans effectively without leaving your skin wondering omgwtf just happened.
So why don't we make tallow face butter?
Putting an ingredient into soap and wearing that ingredient on your face all day are two very different things. Stay tuned for science...
When it comes to moisturizing, ingredients generally help in three different ways:
- Humectants draw water into the outer layers of the skin.
- Emollients smooth and soften by filling in gaps between skin cells.
- Occlusives form a barrier that slows water loss.
Think of it as attract moisture, smooth the surface, then seal it in.
Plain tallow is an anhydrous (containing no water. none) fat, so as a leave-on product it mainly works as a rich emollient and occlusive. It can soften the skin and help reduce moisture loss, but it doesn't supply the humectant side of the equation- it doesn't draw moisture into the outer layers of the skin. That doesn’t make tallow bad, per se- it just means a jar of tallow is not the same thing as a thoughtfully formulated moisturizer that supports hydration from more than one angle.
For dry elbows or cracked heels? Some people may absolutely enjoy a rich, heavy balm. For our leave-on skincare philosophy? Tallow isn't in our lane here.
What about the “tallow is just like human sebum” thing?
You’ll see a lot of claims that beef tallow is uniquely compatible with human skin because some of its fatty acids overlap with lipids naturally present in skin- which in our opinion, gets oversold fast.
Similarity in parts of a fatty acid profile doesn't automatically make a thing “bioidentical” to human sebum. It also doesn't mean tallow absorbs perfectly, won't clog pores, or is inherently superior to plant oils and modern cosmetic emollients.
In fact, the current scientific literature on topical tallow is still limited, which is wild to us when you compare that fact with how confidently some online marketing talks about its use in skincare (*sips tea).
We're not interested in turning "this fat has some useful properties" into "rub this on your face because we're sure your ancestors did and never had a breakout their whole lives." We're more interested in turning it into soap- because we've made thousands of bars designed to remove dirt, grime, and excess oil without chasing a clean so squeaky it feels like a rogue sneeze will cause surprise stretch marks.
Different ingredients have different jobs
We don’t divide ingredients into trendy internet camps of "good" ingredient versus "bad" ingredient. We ask what an ingredient actually does in a specific product, then formulate accordingly.
Tallow earns its place in our soap, but that doesn't automatically mean it earns a place in everything (or anything) else that we make.
When we make something that stays on your skin all day, we’d rather choose ingredients specifically for glide, absorption, hydration, stability, and the finished sensory experience we’re trying to create.
So no: MischiefX Beef Fat Face Frosting is not coming soon.
