Short answer: there is no legal definition of "clean", "natural" or "sustainable" in skincare, so none of those words on a label tell you anything. What does tell you something is whether a brand will name specifics, and whether it will tell you where its evidence runs out. This page is our attempt to do both.
We are Jeremie and Megan Hannon. We make whipped tallow by hand in small batches in Loomis, California. This article used to be a list of things we were proud of, and some of those things turned out to be claims we could not actually stand behind, so we have rewritten it. If you want the short route to the jar itself, it is the Unscented Whipped Tallow, and it is the simplest thing we sell.
Why the labels are worthless on their own
No regulator in the United States defines "clean beauty". A company can print it on a box without meeting any standard, and plenty do. The same goes for "sustainable", which in ordinary use means nothing more demanding than not making things worse.
So the useful question is not which adjective a brand picked. It is whether, when you ask a specific question, you get a specific answer or a paragraph of mood. Four questions worth asking anyone, including us.
1. Where does the main ingredient come from, exactly?
Not the country. The land, the animals or crops, and the practices.
Ours: our tallow comes from grass-fed, grass-finished cattle raised on 150-plus acres of regeneratively farmed land, with no herbicides, pesticides or vaccines, and we render it in small batches ourselves. Regenerative grazing means managing land to rebuild soil rather than deplete it, and it is a working practice rather than a label somebody issues.
That is the whole of what we know and the whole of what we will say. We do not have a laboratory report to hand you, and you should weigh it accordingly.
2. Can you read the ingredient list without looking anything up?
A short list is not virtue for its own sake. It is accountability: every ingredient is a sourcing decision somebody made, and a shorter list is easier to hold a maker to.
Checked against our live catalogue today:
- Unscented Whipped Tallow. Our tallow and organic coconut oil. Nothing else. This is the only jar we describe as two ingredients, and we have corrected older pages of ours that got that wrong.
- Our scented whipped tallows. The same two, plus essential oils. The scent in all of them comes only from third-party-tested essential oils and never from fragrance oil.
- Pure Glow Face Serum. Eight organic plant oils and no tallow: argan, rosehip, jojoba, marula, castor, sea buckthorn, red raspberry seed, and wheat germ for its vitamin E. No essential oils in this one either.
No emulsifiers, no preservatives, no synthetic stabilisers in any of it. If you want the long version of what the sourcing does and does not entitle us to claim, we wrote it up in pesticides, herbicides and hormones in skincare, and the animal-ingredient question has its own page in is tallow vegan.
3. Who actually makes it, and at what scale?
Scale is the sustainability variable nobody puts on a label. Mass production means longer supply chains, more packaging and more distance between whoever made a decision and whoever lives with it.
We render and whip our tallow ourselves, in small batches, in Loomis. The two of us fill the jars. That keeps the chain short and it is also the reason some of our seasonal scents come and go: a batch is a batch, and when it is gone it is gone until the next one. You can see what is actually available at any moment in the whipped tallow collection rather than from a sentence on a blog post, which goes stale the day it is written.
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The simplest thing we make Unscented Whipped Tallow Two ingredients, no fragrance, nothing to look up. Made by hand by the two of us in Loomis. If it is not right for your skin, write to us and we will make it right. |
4. Will they tell you where the evidence stops?
This is the one that separates a brand you can check from a brand you have to trust, and it is the test this very page used to fail. Here is what came off it, and why.
- Three claims about what our cattle are never given, covering veterinary drugs, growth promoters and the type of feed. We have never held documentation for any of the three. They are gone from every page of ours.
- A stated percentage on the grass feeding. The animals are grass-fed and grass-finished. A number implies an audit we do not have.
- A claim that an outside party had checked our inputs. Nobody had. That sentence was the worst thing on this page.
- A claim that the fat in our jars closely matches the oil human skin makes. It is a widely repeated comparison and we cannot point you to a source we have read and confirmed, so we are not making it.
- A list of skin conditions our balm was supposedly good for. Our products are cosmetics. They support the look and feel of comfortable, well-moisturised skin, and that is the end of the sentence.
- A claim about what our customers do. We have nine reviews. Nine reviews is not a dataset about human behaviour and we should never have written as though it were.
We would rather this page be shorter and true. If you catch us at it again, tell us.
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"My wife and I had tried another local brand and it is just not as good as Purelife whipped Tallow. We love this stuff." Brian B, verified buyer, 5 stars, on Lemon + Lavender Whipped Tallow. He is comparing us with another tallow maker rather than a plant butter, which is the comparison this page is really about. |
Does any of this make the product work better?
We do not know, and neither does anyone selling you a label. What we can say is narrower and more useful: we know what is in the jar, we know where the fat came from, and there is nothing in it whose purpose we would struggle to explain to you. For a moisturiser, that is most of what there is to know.
There is one genuine sustainability argument that has nothing to do with sourcing. A product you use once and abandon is waste, whatever its ingredient list. So the honest advice is to buy the smallest, plainest thing first and find out whether your skin likes it before you commit to a shelf of it. For us that is the Unscented jar, and if it is not for you, we would rather you learned that on one jar.
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Common questions
Is "clean beauty" a regulated term? No. There is no legal definition of clean, natural or sustainable in skincare in the United States, which is why a specific sourcing answer is worth more than any of those words.
What does regenerative farming actually mean? Managing land so that soil health improves over time rather than degrades. It is a set of practices, not a badge somebody awards.
How can I check a brand's sourcing claims? Ask one specific question and see whether the answer is specific. Then ask what they cannot prove. A brand that has an answer to the second question is usually telling the truth about the first.
Are your products vegan? The whipped tallow is not, because tallow is beef fat. The Pure Glow Face Serum is eight organic plant oils with no animal ingredient in it.
Why did this article get rewritten? Because it carried six claims we could not support, including one saying an outside party had checked our inputs. We cut them and left a note saying so rather than quietly editing the page.
Where to start
Start with the Unscented jar, a pea-sized scoop at a time, on hands or feet for a week. Prefer the plant-oil route? The Pure Glow Face Serum is the one with no tallow in it. Either way, there are two people in Loomis on the other end of the contact form, and we answer our own email.
This article is educational and not medical advice. Pure Lifestyle products are cosmetics made to support the look and feel of healthy, comfortable skin. They are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent eczema, psoriasis, or any medical condition. If you're managing a skin condition, we recommend working with your healthcare provider.