Why I Started Just Love Tallow

A note from the founder

For most of my life, I thought dry, sensitive skin was just something I had to live with.

I tried everything — the gentle washes, the fragrance-free lotions, the dermatologist-recommended creams in the plain white packaging. Some of them helped for a day or two. Most of them didn't. A few made things worse. And every time I flipped a bottle over to read the ingredients, I'd find a list so long and so full of words I couldn't pronounce that I'd quietly put it back on the shelf and hope for the best.

I wasn't asking for much. I just wanted to know what I was putting on my skin.

The frustrating thing is, that shouldn't be a hard thing to ask for.

The turning point came when I started looking into what people actually used before the age of synthetic skincare. Before the fifty-ingredient moisturisers and the petroleum-derived emollients and the preservatives nobody can name. What I found kept coming back to one thing: animal fats. Specifically, tallow — rendered beef fat that had been used for centuries to protect and nourish skin.

It sounds strange at first. I get it. We've been trained to think of fat as something to avoid, not something to slather on our faces. But the more I read, the more it made sense. Tallow is extraordinarily close in composition to the oils our own skin produces. It absorbs beautifully. It doesn't need a chemistry lab to make it. And the ingredients list? You can actually read it.

So I started making my own.

I won't pretend the first batches were perfect. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of time spent in the kitchen, a lot of moments where I thought this is ridiculous, just buy something from the chemist. But then my skin started to change. The tightness settled. The redness calmed down. For the first time in years, I wasn't thinking about my skin every time I stepped out of the shower.

That was the moment I knew I was onto something real.

I started giving products to friends and family — quietly, without making a big deal of it. Then the messages started coming in. What is this? My skin hasn't felt like this in years. Can I have another one? People with eczema, with baby skin too sensitive for anything from the shops, with conditions they'd been managing for decades — telling me that a little jar of something made from a handful of honest ingredients had done what nothing else had.

That's when Just Love Tallow stopped being a personal project and became something I had to share.

Everything I make is built on the same simple idea: your skin deserves ingredients you can actually understand. No hidden chemicals. No lists that read like a science exam. Just clean, carefully made products from real, recognisable ingredients — crafted with the care and attention that only comes from genuinely loving what you do.

When someone tells me a Just Love Tallow product has changed their skin, I feel it. Because I know exactly what that feels like. That's why I started this, and it's why I'm still here.

Thank you for being part of it.

— David, Founder of Just Love Tallow