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I finally figured out why lotion never did anything for me. And it’s literally in the first ingredient.

I’ve never really been a skincare guy and I’m still not. Admittedly for years I just used bar soap and whatever else happened to be in the shower, and my face always felt kind of tight and looked a bit tired, somewhere along the way I’d decided that was just how my face was and stopped caring.

I did try lotion a few times. It never did much. Half the time it left me shiny and somehow still dry at the same time, which I didn’t even think was possible, so eventually I gave up. Figured some guys just have good skin and I’d drawn the short straw.

The reason I’m writing this is that I finally found out what was actually going on, and it annoyed me that I hadn’t found this out a bit sooner.

I turned a CeraVe bottle over one day and read through the ingredients, and noticed the first one was water, which I thought was a little strange. So one night when I was beyond bored, I decided to look into it, and a couple of things started to make a lot more sense.

Once you know the main thing in there is water, the greasy-but-still-dry thing makes complete sense. It sits on your skin for a minute or two, feels nice, then evaporates and leaves you pretty much where you started, with a thin film of whatever else was floating in there just left on top. So it turns out it was never really my skin being broken or me doing anything wrong. There just wasn’t much in the lotion that actually stayed on my skin.

The bit I didn’t know is that the top layer of your skin is mostly fat, and that fat is what keeps the water locked in. It’s a bit like leather, really. When it dries out it goes tight and stiff, and you don’t fix that by splashing a load of water on it, you rub something oily in to feed it. Skin works in a somewhat similar way, so a water-based lotion was never really going to do much.

I scribbled this out to get it straight in my own head. Don’t judge the artwork:

Right, this is the part where I lose half of you, so bear with me. What can help put the fat back is beef tallow. I know. I know.

I had the exact confused and slightly distrusting reaction you’re probably having right now. But I don’t mean smearing a lump of fat from the pan on your face. I mean tallow that’s been made for your skin, and interestingly it happens to be really close to the kind of fat your skin already makes on its own. There’s no water in it, so it can’t evaporate and leave a weird thin residue. It just goes on and soaks in, which after years of lotion doing nothing for me was a strange thing to see.

The other thing I liked was how little there was to it. I’d never have kept up some big routine, but with this I can just slap it on every morning and forget about it, which to be honest is all I can be bothered to do anyway.

If you’ve ever rubbed Vaseline or Aquaphor into cracked hands in winter, you already know an oily, no-water thing does the job. The problem with those is they sit there heavy and greasy and you can feel them all day. For me tallow didn’t have this issue, so at the time of writing I’m still using it.

What surprised me was the first time I tried it. It actually soaked in, which sounds like a small thing except it’s the exact thing every lotion before it had failed at. A week or so later my wife mentioned that my skin was looking a lot nicer than usual and asked if I was doing anything differently, before I’d even mentioned it to her. Admittedly I was a bit more pleased about this than I should have been. Don’t tell her. Please.

If you want more than my word for it, there’s a 2024 review in a journal called Cureus that looked at what research there is on tallow and skin. The gist was that it works well with skin because the fats in it are close to the ones our own skin makes, though they were honest there isn’t a huge amount of solid research yet. I’ve linked the review here if you want to read it yourself.

One honest thing though. It’s fairly rich, so if your skin runs dry like mine it’s great, but if you’re oily or you break out easily this probably isn’t for you.

I held off on naming it this whole time, mostly because I know exactly how this reads the second I mention a brand, and that wasn’t what I was going for. But it would be a bit pointless telling you all this and not saying what I actually use.

The one I went with is from a brand called Rendered. I liked it because the ingredient list is short and clean. It’s the tallow, a couple of oils that apparently do something useful for your skin that I won’t pretend to understand, and it’s orange scented, which I thought was a smart touch, because tallow on its own can smell a bit. You can take a look for yourself here.