My Weirdly Good Lavender Tallow Balm Routine

Okay so it’s like 10:30 and I just put this stuff on my face. The jar of tallow balm. The lavender one. My heater is doing that clicking thing it does when it turns off and my phone is at 12%. Anyway.

I was just standing in my bathroom staring at my reflection thinking my skin looked sort of… beige. Not bad beige. Just tired beige. It’s winter and everything is dry. The air feels like it’s sucking the moisture right out of you. So I grabbed this little tin of whipped tallow balm. Beef tallow. Sounds weird, I know. I thought it was super weird too. Like putting cooking fat on your face. But my hands were cracking last month, like actually bleeding at the knuckles, and nothing was working. Not the thick lotion from the drugstore, not the fancy cream my sister gave me. So I got desperate and ordered this lavender tallow balm from some Etsy shop in France on a Tuesday night. It was like $28 or something. I didn’t expect much.

But here I am, a few weeks later, smearing it on before bed. It’s become a thing.

How I Started Using Tallow on My Face

Look, the whole beef tallow for skin thing made me pause. I’m not a crunchy person. I eat microwave meals. But I kept seeing people talk about it online, saying it was good for sensitive skin or rough hands or even psoriasis. And the logic sort of… stuck? They say it mimics human skin sebum. So it absorbs deep or whatever. I don’t know the science. I just know my skin was angry.

The first time I opened the jar I just sniffed it for a solid minute. Smelled like lavender. But not like a candle. More like… the actual plant? My grandma had lavender bushes. It’s that smell. Herbal. Not sweet. Calming, I guess. The texture threw me. It’s whipped, so it’s this creamy paste. Not greasy. You scoop a tiny bit—like half the size of a pea—and it melts as soon as you rub your fingers together. It goes on sort of shiny but then it’s just gone. Into your skin. Doesn’t feel like anything’s there after a minute.

My nightly tallow balm routine is stupid simple. I wash my face with that cheap Cetaphil bar. Pat it dry but leave it a tiny bit damp. Then I take that little bit of balm, warm it up in my palms, and just press it all over. Cheeks, forehead, neck. Sometimes I do a second pass on my elbows if they’re feeling like sandpaper. The whole thing takes maybe 90 seconds. Then I go to bed. That’s it. No ten-step process.

What This Lavender Tallow Balm Actually Does

The sleep thing is real. Or maybe it’s a placebo. I don’t care. The scent is this timeless herbal smell, not perfume-y. You put it on and it’s just there. A quiet smell. I find myself taking a deeper breath after I put it on. My brain goes, “Oh. Bedtime.” It’s a signal. My anxiety… it doesn’t vanish. But the ritual of it, the smell, it’s soothing. It’s a thing I do for me that has nothing to do with my phone or my to-do list. Just rubbing this weird beef fat on my face for a minute.

And my skin? It’s not magic. I didn’t wake up with baby skin. But after a week, the tight, dry feeling was gone. The flaky patch by my nose just… stopped. My hands, the main reason I bought it, healed up. The cracks closed. They’re just normal hands now. I keep the jar on my nightstand and sometimes I’ll put a dab on the back of my hands while I’m reading. It’s become this little self-maintenance thing. Daily skincare with tallow sounds fancy but it’s just this.

I remember telling my friend Mark about it and he made a face. “You put what on your face?” But then he tried it on his knuckles after working on his car. He texted me two days later like, “Okay what was that stuff called again.”

My Skin After a Few Weeks of This Stuff

So it’s been maybe a month now. I’m halfway through the jar. I’ll need to order another one soon. The results are… subtle but solid. My face doesn’t get that red, irritated feeling when I come in from the cold wind anymore. It just feels calm. Protected. The texture is smoother. Not “filter” smooth. Just healthy. Like it’s not fighting the environment.

I used to have this expensive night cream. It came in a fancy glass jar and cost way too much. It smelled like flowers and chemicals. It just sat on top of my skin, all slick. This tallow balm, this grass-fed beef suet whipped into a balm, it just sinks in. It feels more like feeding my skin than covering it up. I don’t know how else to say it.

And the lavender scent is still there every night. It’s not strong. It’s just this quiet, relaxing note. It promotes sleep for me because now my brain associates the smell with winding down. I do my little routine, smell the lavender, and my body knows it’s time to shut off. It’s become the anchor for my whole evening.

Quick Questions I Get Asked

Is beef tallow good for your face? Yeah, surprisingly. I was super skeptical. But the idea is that it’s really similar to the oils our own skin makes. So instead of sitting on top and clogging things, it gets absorbed and helps your skin barrier do its job. It made sense to me once my dry, sensitive skin stopped freaking out.

Does tallow balm clog pores? Hasn’t for me. And I can get clogged pores easy. Because it absorbs and mimics sebum, it doesn’t just block everything up like some heavy lotions can. It feels more like it’s balancing things out. My skin seems less oily during the day now, actually.

What does lavender tallow balm smell like? It smells like real lavender. Not air freshener lavender. It’s herbal, a little earthy, very calming. It’s not a perfume scent. It’s a natural, relaxing smell that fades pretty quickly after you put it on. It just sets a nice, quiet mood for bed.

Anyway. If your skin is feeling rough or tight or just unhappy, maybe give a tallow balm routine a look. Learning how to use tallow balm is the easiest part—you just use it. I got mine from this little Etsy shop that makes it in France. I’m probably gonna order another jar soon. My skin’s happy, I’m sleeping better, and that’s honestly more than I expected from a tin of whipped beef fat. So yeah. It just works.