Does Tallow Balm Smell Like Beef?

Does tallow balm smell like beef?

A properly rendered tallow balm should smell of almost nothing: a faint beeswax and olive-oil note in the jar that is gone within a few minutes of going on skin. If a tallow balm smells like a roast dinner, that is protein and connective tissue left behind by a fast, hot render, not the fat itself. AusTallow contains no fragrance and no essential oils, so there is nothing in it to cover a smell, which means we cannot get away with a poor render.

Where the smell actually comes from

Clean fat has very little smell. What smells like meat is protein. Raw suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys that tallow is rendered from, comes with connective tissue, blood vessels and small amounts of muscle attached. If you melt it fast and hot, those proteins cook, brown and dissolve into the fat, and you have effectively made a beef stock with your moisturiser. That smell does not fade, because it is now part of the product.

It also shortens the shelf life. Protein is what spoils. Fat on its own, with no water and no protein, is remarkably stable.

What good rendering does about it

We render low and slow, in water, over several passes. Wet rendering means simmering the minced suet in water so the water-soluble impurities and proteins leach out, letting it cool, lifting the set fat off the top and doing it again. Each pass pulls more out. We also discard the bottom of every pour, which is where the last of the fine particles settle.

It is slow, it uses a lot of pans, and it is the single biggest cost difference between a cheap tallow balm and a good one. Most commercial tallow is dry-rendered once, fast, because that is what makes it cheap. It is also why so many people who tried a tallow balm once and hated the smell never tried another.

One honest detail: tallow smells while it is hot, even clean tallow. Anyone who tells you their rendering kitchen smells of nothing is not rendering. What matters is what is left in the fat once it has cooled and set, and that is where the passes do their work.

Why we do not add fragrance

The obvious fix for a smelly tallow balm is to add lavender, or an essential-oil blend, or a synthetic parfum. A lot of brands do exactly that. Two problems.

First, fragrance, including essential oils, is one of the most common causes of contact reactions in skincare. Adding it to a product that people are often buying precisely because their skin objects to everything else is backwards.

Second, if a tallow balm smells strongly of something pleasant, you have no way of knowing what it smelled like before. Fragrance in a tallow product is very often there to hide the render. Ours has nowhere to hide, which we think is the point.

What it actually smells like

Being precise about this is more useful than saying it smells like nothing. In the jar, held up to your nose, you will get beeswax first, a little olive oil, and if you go looking for it a faint, clean, slightly savoury fat note underneath. It is not unpleasant and it is not strong. Most people who have not been told it is tallow do not identify it as animal fat.

On skin, it is noticeable for the first minute or two while it is warming and being absorbed, then it is gone. Warm skin releases more scent than cool skin, so you may notice it more straight after a hot shower than before bed. If you can still smell it an hour later, something is wrong with the render.

The smell also varies slightly batch to batch, because we render from real suet rather than a standardised industrial fat, and the animals are not all the same. It is always faint. It is not always identical.

Using smell as a quality check

If you are comparing tallow balms, your nose is a reasonable instrument.

• Strong beef or roast smell: a fast, hot render. Expect the smell to linger on skin and the jar to have a shorter life.
• Strong lavender, citrus or "botanical" smell: fragrance or essential oils have been added. Check the ingredient list for what they might be covering, and be cautious if your skin reacts easily.
• Faint beeswax, faint fat, fades fast: a clean render with nothing added. This is what you want.
• Sharp, waxy, old-cooking-oil smell: the fat has oxidised. That is age or heat exposure, not a rendering problem, and the jar should be retired.

AusTallow is a cosmetic moisturiser. It is not a therapeutic good and it is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or skin condition. Information on this page is general in nature. If you have a diagnosed skin condition, speak to your GP or dermatologist.