Lost in the criticism of TikTok’s tallow skincare trend? It’s not tallow — it’s lard.
TikTok trends are always good for a laugh, and the latest, the DIY rendering of tallow for skincare, is no exception. Now, I’m very pro-tallow — I’ve been rendering tallow, grinding suet, and cooking and DIYing with them both for years. I’m also familiar with its cosmetic uses throughout history. In theory, using tallow for cosmetic purposes isn’t what’s hilarious about this trend; it’s the practice of using ersatz tallow, like they do on TikTok, that is. I have laughed out loud watching instructional videos of people buying supermarket meat, rendering fat trimmings, and thinking it’s tallow; if you want to understand the Dunning-Kruger effect, these videos are a good place to start.
Contrary to what they believe, these TikTok creators aren’t making true tallow. They’re not even rendering suet. And to compound the joke, they seem to be denying what their own senses are telling them about the end product, which is that unlike true tallow, it will inevitably turn rancid.
To understand what’s going wrong here, let’s start with an anatomy lesson. Suet is specifically the fat around the kidneys, and is more formally known as perirenal fat. Designed for protection, it’s very hard, like wax (i.e., tallow candles). Drop it on the counter and it will go clonk. Suet is also excellent for making dumplings, popovers (aka Yorkshire puddings), and pie crusts, and for frying steaks and chops. When you render suet — which is done by removing its water content and any nonlipid bits over gentle heat — the end product is defined as “tallow.”
To get suet you’ll need to go to a real butcher and buy it in slabs or preground (it needs to be ground for cooking). Atora, the most popular suet brand sold in the U.K., appears to be the only mass-market brand sold in the U.S., but for an eye-popping $18 per pound on Amazon (I pay $3 per pound, already ground, at my local independent butcher shop). If you search for suet on Amazon, 98 percent of the results will be wild bird food not fit for human consumption. Fortunately, you can often find Atora in the supermarket baking aisle (see: pie crusts).
The muscular fat that TikTokers are trimming from brisket, chuck roast, and other cuts of meat is not suet, and what they’re making with it is absolutely not tallow (putting aside the shortcomings of the English language; more on that below). Muscular fat has none of the characteristics of suet: Drop it on the counter, and it will make no sound. It might even bounce. It will be soft and squishy at room temperature rather than solid and hard like suet. When rendered, it turns to purified grease, aka lard. Not tallow.
And no matter what TikTok tells you, rendering suet into tallow is not a multiday process requiring refrigeration. Instead, it entails a few hours of gently simmering the suet to evaporate its water content, and then a simple straining of any desiccated connective bits. That’s it. What they’re doing on TikTok is basically making gravy or broth, chilling and separating the fat again and again. They’re even intentionally adding water to the pot in order to separate the grease, which is the opposite of what you do to make tallow. Because bacteria need water to live, once the water is removed, true tallow is not susceptible to decay. In other words: no refrigeration necessary.
This is tallow’s most important characteristic. Since it never goes bad it’s ideal for applications like pemmican, a traditional Native American food made of dried meat and tallow that will keep for years unrefrigerated. Meanwhile, that $20 Etsy jar of rose-and-eucalyptus-scented beef grease will smell noxious in time, despite the essential oils used to mask the stink. People who have made or purchased this homemade beef lard (again: not tallow) quickly realize this, at least if Reddit postings like “Is rancid beef tallow still viable for skin care” and “Rendered tallow 4 times and still smells beefy” are any indication. Another giveaway that these products are not, in fact, made with tallow? Since tallow is solid, it can’t be whipped into anything that will be soft and creamy and able to be smeared. At room temperature, it has the same consistency as a brick of paraffin — not exactly ideal for spreading all over your skin.
To be fair, part of the confusion may be due to the inadequacy of the English word for rendered beef fat, because “tallow” can mean both general rendered beef fat and rendered suet. In the circles where “true” tallow really matters, no one ever uses the TikTok definition that includes table scraps. It’s important to differentiate between rendered renal fat and rendered muscular fat because they have wildly different properties. We should start describing rendered fat taken from any part of the body other than the kidneys as “beef lard,” while “tallow” should be reserved for only rendered renal fat.
Don’t believe me? Just look how diplomatic Google AI is:
“...While suet is the most common fat used to make tallow, technically, tallow can be made from other animal fats, but it’s important to note that the resulting product might not have the same characteristics as true tallow which is specifically rendered from suet, the hard fat found around the kidneys of cattle ... while not technically ‘tallow’ in the strict sense, you can render fat from other parts of an animal but the quality and properties might differ ... do not confuse rendered fat from muscle tissue with tallow, as they have different characteristics and uses...”
The bottom line is that people are literally smearing rancid meat grease on their faces, and other people are making thousands of dollars selling scented jars of beef lard that will become nasty in a few weeks.
But it’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Consider the 1933 movie Hard to Handle, starring James Cagney as a publicist named Lefty Merrill who gets rich convincing women they can lose weight by smearing expensive jars of lard all over their bodies. As part of his sales pitch, he uses the testimony and newspaper pics of a famous socialite, Kardashian-style.
“Yaps, suckers, chumps,” Lefty says. “Anything you want to call ’em. The public. And how do you get ’em? Publicity... Exploitation. Advertising. Ballyhoo. Full of hot air — the greatest force in modern-day civilization!”
Hardly Kephart is an outdoorsman living in Portland, Oregon. When not camping, fishing, foraging or kayaking, he blogs at Medium.
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