Why tallow? At Vellum Street, we don't believe you should put anything on your skin that you wouldn't put in your mouth. All of our tallow based soaps, balms, lotions, salts, and candles are made from high quality, food grade ingredients, locally & organically sourced, often from the kitchens of local restaurants & farms in the form of upcycled material that would normally be considered waste.
Tallow is rich in the same types of lipids found in youthful, vibrant skin. The fatty acids in tallow are much closer in molecular structure and size (and therefore, more bioavailable) to the oils our own skin produces, then the plant oils more commonly used in skin care products (which tend to have a larger molecule size). This smaller molecular mass allows the tallow to penetrate the skin barrier, actually reaching below the surface to get a little more than just skin deep!
Aside from its multitude of glorious skin benefits, using tallow from animals raised on small, local, regenerative agricultural focused farms, pastured & humanely raised, is one of the most eco conscious ways we can source ingredients. Large scale farming of crops such as palm, soy, and even coconut, strip the soil of nutrients and decimate native animal habits and ecosystems. By putting the tallow from these local operations to good use, we are helping to maximize energy spent on production, using every last bit with the ultimate goal of little to no waste. Food production is a difficult job, and we are very thankful to the farms, processors, animals, and plants who contribute to providing for us, and wish to honor them by appreciating and utilizing every last bit we can. By sourcing locally as much as possible, we eliminate the immense waste produced with packaging and shipping ingredients to us across land and sea. With nothing added that doesn't have a beneficial purpose for your skin, you can be assured you're getting a top notch product, thoughtfully crafted & scientifically executed, that's suds of fun!
Our Tallow
We work with a handful of small farms in the Philadelphia/Bucks/Chester/Lancaster County areas, but mainly Tussock Sedge and Wyebrook.
You can read about Wyebrook cattle here:
https://www.wyebrookfarm.com/our-animals (
100% whole life rotationally pastured, with locally grown corn & spent brewery grain finished supplement in the last few weeks before slaughter (less than 5%).
Vellum Street has been commercially selling and formulating tallow skincare since 2015, and I (Melissa) was personally making it myself for many many years before that via my grandmother's recipes). We understand that since tallow has become a trendy skincare option in the past few years, grass fed and finished has become a HUGE marketing point. While we certainly agree that garbage, pesticide treated, or GMO grain isn't something we want the cattle we utilize to be eating, we do allow for the farms we source from to utilize non GMO, non pesticide grains to be used as a small percentage of supplemental finishing feed. Just as the wild deer and turkeys we hunt and eat are likely eating (and unharmed) by some corn and acorns, so too are the cattle. More important is the nutrient quality of the soil in which the grass grows, and the hay being fed (is the hay produced on site? Is it pesticide and herbicide free? Is the soil health being monitored and improved? For all of the cattle we source the answer is yes).
So, in a simple answer, yes, some of our tallow is grass fed and finished, and some of it is grass fed but not 100% grass finished. We never source from feed lots, any grain being eaten is fed to cows that are still foraging on pasture daily and is used only as a small supplement. In almost ten years of existing as a commercial tallow skincare company, and ten years prior to that as a professional chef who focused on food sustainability and ancestral nutrition, the quality of the tallow we used comes down to so much more than just grass fed and finished. We take into consideration so many additional factors including soil quality, water quality, and perform regular testing on the nutrient profiles of our tallow.
We don't personally use the term "grass fed" on our label because it is a term that essentially means nothing, as there is no real enforcement in place for use of the term. We do our best to not contribute to hyperbole and greenwashed terms, and keep marketing buzzwords off of our packaging as we strive to be as authentic and educational as we can be.
We absolutely do not purify our tallow! Purifying (also known as wet rendering) causes the nutrient levels of the tallow to decline, and we want our products to be as nutrient dense as possible. Purifying also adds water into the mix. Whenever you are using water in skincare (unless it is in soap making) the use of a preservative is required for safety. Bacteria and mold breed in water, and if you do not use a preservative with water based products, they can easily support growth that is not easily detectable by the eye or nose, making a product that looks and smells okay potentially unsafe. In our opinion, formed from years of quality control testing under lab conditions, there is no reason at all to purify tallow - it is already a pure material. The purifying of tallow became a trendy technique when tallow skincare saw the rise in popularity that I spoke of earlier, as dry rendering tallow is a much more labor intensive process. With dry rendering, the tallow is heated at very low temperatures over many hours with nothing additional (water, salt, or otherwise) added, and must be monitored and tended to closely.
