When Sascha Green goes to Costco, she buys ground pork, turkey and chicken breasts for a week of dinners. And then she gets steak for her face.
It may seem gross, but beef tallow — rendered fat from around a cow’s organs — has become a popular ingredient in cosmetic products. Customers swear by its natural moisturizing properties while businesses have begun selling tallow-based creams to meet the demand. But dermatologists warn that just because something’s natural doesn’t mean you should put it on your face.
“I give it a thumbs down from the scientific and dermatologic perspective,” said Dr. Zakia Rahman, a clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “It could potentially cause acne flares or cause irritation.”
Still, many people swear by its benefits. Last year, Ms. Green, 28, stopped spending a fortune on a litany of skin care products when she started seeing TikToks from people promoting what they described as a natural miracle ingredient that’s cheaper than Sephora products.
“I made my own to start, just by getting meat from Costco and stripping the fat off the meat and rendering it,” said Ms. Green, who lives in Hillsdale, Ind., about 70 miles west of Indianapolis.
In a video documenting her process, she cooked the fat repeatedly with water and salt, removing brown-colored impurities until she was left with a white, waxy disk. She then whipped it up with essential oils and declared it ready.
The way Ms. Green talks about tallow you would think she’s describing a magical drug — not an ingredient that most butchers discard. Before bed? Ms. Green turns to tallow. Bug bites? Tallow. Rashes? Dry skin? Bad burns? Lather on the beef-based ointments.
Tallow face creams appear to work for many people like Rachel Ogden, 48, of Middle Tennessee, who said she has had bad reactions to commercial beauty products. Within a minute of applying tallow, she said, her skin goes from “dry” to almost “greasy” to fully “nourished.”
Tallow has been in the news lately. Robert F. Kennedy, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is a prominent promoter of cooking tallow. On podcasts, he regularly advocates for cooking with it and even sells hats that say “MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN.”
Cooking tallow and skin care tallow are slightly different. Cooking tallow can refer to a wide array of rendered fats while skin care tallow is usually rendered beef suet, or fat from around the cow’s kidney.
Searching “beef tallow” on TikTok produces a smorgasbord of content from the past year. Influencers with tens of thousands of followers advertise the natural ingredient while smaller creators, like Ms. Green, share testimonials for tallow products.
Not everyone is on board, though.
Face creams, said Dr. Rahman, the dermatology professor, should have a higher percentage of linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fatty acid, than oleic acid, monounsaturated fatty acid. But Beef tallow has the opposite: It is 47 percent oleic acid while only 3 percent linoleic acid.
Dr. Mary L. Stevenson, a dermatologic surgeon and an associate professor of dermatology at NYU Langone Health, also said that tallow can cause acne and “should generally not be used on the face.”
“There is little data for it, and there are so many alternative options,” she wrote in an email. “I do not recommend it to patients.”
But tallow’s controversy has partly fueled its popularity, and now beef fat face products are everywhere. There are dozens of businesses that sell tallow-based creams and even farms have taken note.
On her 1,800-acre ranch in rural Northern California, Mary Heffernan, 46, melts suet in large crockpots until she is left with a wax block that resembles flan. She whips up the rendered fat with essential oils and swirls it into jars.
Ms. Heffernan has sold premium cuts of beef from her ranch, Five Marys in Siskiyou County, Calif., for a decade. But it wasn’t until January when she discovered that suet, which is usually tossed out with the cow’s carcass, can be one of the most profitable parts of the animal.
“Thanks to TikTok and social media for really promoting tallow as trendy,” she said. “When we released it on our website, we sold $42,000 in tallow overnight. Sold out.”
The margins on her $16 jars of beef tallow cream are great, she said. They sell 2,000 jars in a slow month, leading her husband, Brian, to jokingly wonder why they still sell beef.
Morgan Helm, 24, lives in Manhattan and works in finance. She ordered her first tallow-based cosmetic product in January when she learned about it on a podcast. Now, tallow is all she uses to moisturize her face.
“I’ve noticed such a huge difference,” Ms. Helm said. Bumps on her body “completely go away,” and when she travels without her Toups & Co Organics grass-fed tallow balm she notices skin irritation.
“Smelling a little beefy,” she said, “might just be the cost of having a glowing face.”
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