I'm Brian. I run Craft Tallow from Cottonwood Heights, Utah. This journal starts the way the company did: with me explaining what we make and why you should trust it.
How this started
It started with label reading. I wanted a moisturizer I could explain to my own family, every line of it, and I kept finding forty-ingredient lists built around water, fillers, and preservatives. Rendered beef fat kept coming up in the old household manuals I was reading instead. People used tallow on skin for centuries because it worked and because they knew exactly what it was. A sealed second-century Roman cosmetic tin recovered in London still held its cream, and the analysis put it at roughly 40 percent animal fat from cattle or goats, cut with starch to take the greasy feel off. I rendered some suet, warmed it, blended it by hand, and the first jar convinced me. The next two years went into recipes.
The apothecary half
An apothecary made small batches from whole materials and wrote everything down. We work the same way. The base of every jar is 100% suet tallow from grass-fed, grass-finished cattle, rendered slow and low. The botanicals are whole extracts in amber glass. Our great-grandmothers kept this fat by the stove, and we handle it with the care they gave it, plus a scale that reads to a hundredth of a gram.
The modern half
The old shops had the craft but not the research, and we work with both. Velvet Face Renewal carries bakuchiol at a true 1%. A randomized trial in the British Journal of Dermatology ran 0.5% bakuchiol against 0.5% retinol over twelve weeks, and we formulate above that studied dose, stated on the product page in plain numbers. Our vitamin C is the oil-soluble form that stays stable in a waterless balm, and CoQ10 rides in the same jar. Blue tansy in Moonlight Calm sits at a studied dose, a real amount of one of the costliest oils in skincare. It stays there because essential oils are a real source of contact allergy, and published safety tables cap leave-on facial use.
Who makes your jar
The recipes are mine. A specialist formulation partner produces components to those recipes, blended in small batches in the Mountain West. I check every order and ship it from Cottonwood Heights, Utah. Two sets of hands touch your jar, and my name is the one on the company. If something's off, write to us through the contact page and it lands with me.
The standard, in five lines
Suet only, grass-fed and grass-finished. Waterless recipes, which is why no jar carries a preservative system. Labels short enough to read out loud, actives at the doses the studies used, and sixty days to disagree with any of it for your money back. The reasoning behind that guarantee has its own page.
What this journal is for
Bench notes, batch news, recipe thinking, and honest readings of the research we build on. Next up: a tour of the five balms and a walkthrough of the Craft Tallow Kit ($110, on pre-order with about a three-week ship window). The deeper story on the base fat lives in beef tallow for skin: the complete guide and on Why Tallow, and the full sourcing deck is on Our Ingredients. Welcome to the bench.
Sources
- Mansell K (2004). Recreating a 2,000-year-old cosmetic. Nature news.
- Dhaliwal S et al. (2019). Prospective, randomized, double-blind assessment of topical bakuchiol and retinol for facial photoageing. British Journal of Dermatology 180:289-296.
- Warshaw EM et al. (2021). Contact Dermatitis to Essential Oils. Current Dermatology Reports.