The weeks after birth are a strange time for skin, and almost nobody warns you about it. Hormones drop, skin that stretched is settling again, you are washing your hands forty times a day, and you have suddenly started reading the back of every bottle in the house because there is a newborn attached to you.
This is a piece about keeping that part simple. The jar most new mothers ask us about is the plain one: our Unscented Whipped Tallow, which is grass fed tallow and organic coconut oil and nothing else. No water, no preservatives, no emulsifiers, no fragrance.
What actually changes
Estrogen and progesterone fall sharply after months of running high. Skin that felt plump and oily in the third trimester can turn dry and reactive within a fortnight. The skin over the belly, hips and thighs is settling back after a long stretch. Hands take a beating from constant washing. Sleep, which is when a lot of skin housekeeping happens, is in short supply.
None of that is a problem to be fixed with a product. It is a season. What a moisturizer can do in a season like that is straightforward and worth being honest about: it sits on the surface and slows water leaving the skin, so skin looks and feels more comfortable while everything else settles down on its own schedule.
Why a short ingredient list appeals right now
Most new parents we hear from are not chasing a miracle. They are trying to shrink the number of things in the bathroom they have to think about. A balm with two ingredients on the label is easy to think about at two in the morning.
Tallow is rendered beef fat, and its fatty acid profile is close to what human skin produces on its own, which is part of why a small amount sinks in rather than sitting as a film. Grass fed tallow naturally carries the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K2 as part of the fat itself, with nothing added in a lab.
Fragrance is the part worth being fussy about right now. Essential oils are lovely and we use them in our scented jars, but postpartum skin is often less predictable than usual, and there is a newborn face pressed against you for most of the day. Fragrance free is the sensible default for this stretch.
Two ingredients. No fragrance. One jar, most of the household covered.
Grass fed tallow and organic coconut oil, whipped by hand in Loomis, California. The jar we point new mothers to first.
On the mechanism: occlusive moisturizers work by slowing water loss through the outer layer of skin, which holds only about ten to thirty percent water compared with roughly eighty percent in the layers beneath it (Moisturizers, StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf).
Where new mothers actually use it
Hands, knuckles and wrists. This is the one nobody predicts. Between hand washing, sanitizer and wet wipes, postpartum hands get rougher than postpartum bellies. A pea sized amount after the last wash of the evening.
Belly, hips and thighs. Warm a small amount between your palms and work it in after a shower, while skin is still slightly damp. The damp matters more than the quantity.
Elbows, shins and the back of the neck. The places that get dry and never get product.
Lips. Dehydration plus mouth breathing through short nights is hard on lips. A tube of Lip Relief in the nappy bag is easier to reach one handed than a jar.
The parts to ask someone about first
We would rather be useful than eager here, so a few plain limits.
The breast and nipple area, if you are nursing. Talk to your midwife, health visitor, lactation consultant or doctor before putting any new product there. Skin in direct contact with a feeding baby is a different question from skin anywhere else, and it is not one a balm maker should be answering for you.
A caesarean scar or any broken skin. Not until whoever is looking after your recovery tells you the skin is ready for ordinary moisturizer. A balm is for intact skin.
Anything that is changing, spreading, weeping or painful. That is a conversation with a clinician, not a jar.
Patch test first. A small amount on the inside of the forearm, and wait a day. Skin sensitivity in the early weeks is genuinely unpredictable and this costs you nothing.
What to keep, and when
The honest advice is not to overhaul anything right now. Take one product out of the routine and put one in, when you have a spare minute, which will be in about four months.
Start with the Unscented Whipped Tallow. Later, when things have settled and you fancy something that smells like a person who gets showers, the rest of the whipped tallow range is there, and the Pure Glow Face Serum is eight organic plant oils with no tallow and no essential oils in it, for when a face routine feels like something you have time for again.
Who is making this
We are Jeremie and Megan. Every batch is rendered and whipped by hand in small runs in Loomis, California, and our name is on the jar. If a jar does not suit you, tell us and we will make it right. That is the whole promise and it is deliberately short.
Start with the simplest jar we make.
Fragrance free, two ingredients, and a little goes a long way on nights when you have one hand free.
Want the 10% off code first? Pop your email in and we will send it over, along with the occasional note from the kitchen.