Tallow balm comparison: 12 brands side by side (September 2026)

This is every tallow balm I could line up in one place, eleven other brands and mine, one row each. I should say the obvious thing first: I make one of these. Craft Tallow is my company and Bare Silk is my jar, so read my row the way you would read any founder grading his own homework. That is also why the table is alphabetical and why Craft sits third, between Based Supplies and Evil Goods, rather than at the top where a brand usually puts itself.

Every cell came off the brand's own product page on September 6, 2026. Where a brand publishes an unscented or plain version of its balm, that is the row I used, because that is the closest thing to a like-for-like against Bare Silk Unscented. Where a brand does not publish one, the row is their main balm and the Product column says which jar it is. Where a page did not say something, the cell reads "not stated," which means the page was quiet on it, not that the answer is no.

What the columns mean. Base fat is the exact words the brand uses for the fat. Suet named asks whether the page says suet or kidney fat, not just tallow. Grass-finished asks whether the page says finished, not only grass-fed. Water asks whether water, aqua, hydrosol or aloe appears in the ingredient list. Ingredient count is how many things are named on the label. Net weight and price come straight off the page, and price per ounce is the second divided by the first. Texture is only what the brand itself calls it. Try window is the guarantee as written. Click any column header to sort. Every cell is checkable on the brand's own page in about a minute, and if I have one wrong, I want the email.

Sorting needs JavaScript. If it is switched off, the table still reads top to bottom in alphabetical order by brand.

Five cells need a sentence of their own. Ancestral Cosmetics prices in euro and showed no US dollar price, and their unscented page did not restate a jar size, so I left net weight and price per ounce blank rather than borrow the size from their scented Original, which is listed at 60 ml (2 oz) for the same €26.00. Evil Goods does not print a net weight on the product page; the 4 oz in that row comes from their own store weight field, which reads 113 g. Based Supplies shows its ingredient panel as an image rather than as text, and the unscented version was showing sold out on the day I looked. Vintage Tradition prints fluid ounces, a volume, where everyone else prints ounces with no qualifier, so its price per ounce is not strictly comparable to the rest of the column. Vanman states suet on the Classic page but the word finished appears on their no-added-essential-oils page instead, so that cell says not stated for the page in question.

Two brands sell a better-known balm than the one I listed. Primally Pure's Everything Balm is the famous one at $30.00 for 1 oz and $56.00 for 2 oz with ten line items on the label, and it carries lavender and tea tree, so their Baby Balm is the unscented jar and that is what the table compares. Vanman sells the same Classic balm with no added essential oils at the same $29.00, and states plainly that it is not unscented and will smell like tallow.

How to read this

Suet versus trim. Tallow is a category, not a grade. Suet is the dense fat from around the kidneys; trim is the fat pared off the outside of the cuts, and it is what most rendering starts with because there is far more of it. A page that says only "tallow" or "beef tallow" is telling you the species and not the cut. Six brands in the table name suet or kidney fat somewhere a buyer can find it: Ancestral Cosmetics, Craft Tallow, Gentle Tallow Co., Hearth & Homestead, Tallow Me Pretty and Vanman. Vintage Tradition explains suet on a separate page about their tallow rather than on the balm's own page. That is not a scandal, it is just a thing worth knowing before you compare two jars on price.

Grass-finished, not only grass-fed. Nearly every cow starts on grass, so "grass-fed" on its own is close to free to say. "Grass-finished" is the word that rules out a grain finish in the last months, and it is the one that costs a brand something to stand behind. Nine of the twelve rows say finished; Primally Pure and Vintage Tradition say grass-fed without it on the pages I read, and Vanman says it on a sister page. When you are looking at two balms at the same price, this is usually the cheapest tiebreaker available to you.

Water. None of the twelve ingredient lists contain water, aqua, hydrosol or aloe, and that is worth saying plainly because it is the one column where the whole category agrees. It matters for a boring reason rather than a dramatic one: water is what forces a preservative system, and it is also what a lotion is mostly made of. A balm with no water is fat and oil, so the antioxidants are doing a different job than a preservative would. If you ever see water high on a tallow product's list, that is a cream, not a balm, and it should be priced and judged as one.

Label length. Short is not automatically better and long is not automatically worse. Toups and Co and Vintage Tradition run two ingredients, which is about as short as a balm gets. Tallow Me Pretty runs eleven, most of them essential oils, which is a scent decision. What the count is good for is matching a label to a face: if your skin reacts to fragrance, the count and the names matter more than any other column, and a two or five ingredient jar with no essential oils gives you fewer things to rule out. Ours is five, and none of them are fragrance.

Price per ounce, by net weight. This is the column that moves the most when you actually do the arithmetic, because jar sizes in this category run from 1.3 oz to 4 oz and the sticker price hides that. Gentle Tallow Co. at $10.00 an ounce and Hearth & Homestead at $23.07 an ounce are less than four dollars apart on the shelf. One more wrinkle: a whipped balm is sold by volume in your head and by weight on the label, and up to half of a whipped jar can be air, so weight is the only fair basis for the comparison. Two of the twelve rows are whipped by the brand's own description, ours is poured dense, and nine do not say either way.

The try window. A guarantee is only as good as its number and its conditions. The windows here run from no stated window at all, through 30 days, to Tallow Me Pretty at 90 days and ours at 60. Read the conditions next to the number: Hearth & Homestead's 30 days covers new unopened items and refunds as store credit, which is a different promise from a used-jar refund. Vintage Tradition asks you to try the 2 fl oz jar before you order the 9 fl oz. Four brands promise money back with no day count anywhere I could find, which is generous in spirit and hard to hold anyone to.

What the table can't tell you

Scent is the big one. Unscented is a label claim, not a smell, and tallow itself has a scent that depends on the cut and how low the render ran. Vanman says so directly on their no-essential-oil page: not unscented, will smell like tallow. Ancestral says their process leaves no beefy smell. Ours is nearly scentless because the base is suet rendered low and slow, but no column can tell you whether you personally will notice something. That is a sample-sized question, not a spreadsheet question.

Feel is the second one. Two jars with nearly identical labels can sit very differently on skin depending on how they were made, how hard they set, and what the oils do underneath. Whipped scoops easier straight out of a cold jar. Dense goes further per fingertip and warms in about three seconds between two fingers. Neither of those is in a cell, and I would not trust a table that claimed otherwise.

Heat behavior is the third. Every balm in this table is fat, so every balm in this table will soften, melt in a hot car or a metal mailbox in August, and set up again. Whipped tends to collapse and can re-set grainy. Dense usually comes back smooth. A grainy jar is the fat rearranging, not spoilage, and warming the closed jar in your hands, stirring with a clean dry spoon and chilling it twenty minutes brings most of them back.

And the last one is the person behind it. Half these brands are a family and a small kitchen, and the table flattens that into a price per ounce. It cannot tell you who answers the email when something goes wrong, whether the recipe changes between batches, or how long the company has been at it. I would weigh that at least as heavily as any column above.

Go deeper

If you want the reasoning rather than the grid, start with how to choose a tallow balm, then how to read a tallow label for the suet, grass-finished and water checks in longer form. If you landed here looking for a swap, alternatives to Primally Pure and Toups and Co covers the two most-searched ones, and the two full head-to-heads are Craft Tallow versus Primally Pure and Craft Tallow versus Toups and Co.

Five more head-to-heads are written and scheduled, and I will link them here as they publish: Evil Goods versus Based Supplies on September 10, Toups and Co versus Primally Pure on September 17, Hearth and Homestead versus Vintage Tradition on September 24, Neptune versus Vanman on October 1, and Ancestral Cosmetics versus Tallow Me Pretty on October 8.

If you want to start with ours

The jar in our row is Bare Silk Unscented, $34 for 2 oz, five ingredients, no fragrance. It comes with the 60-Day Skin Test: use it for up to sixty days, and if your skin disagrees, email us and we refund the product price. If you want it on a schedule, subscribe to three jars and a fourth rides free on your first delivery, and every subscription takes 25% off that first delivery and ships free. If you would rather work out which of our five jars fits your skin, the two-minute quiz sorts it faster than this table will.

Updated September 2026. Prices, sizes and labels change, sometimes quietly. If you work at one of these brands and a cell is wrong or out of date, email hi@crafttallow.com with a link to the page and I will correct it and note the date.