Yuja Tallow Balm

No. This formula is built on tallow, which is rendered beef fat, so it is not vegan or vegetarian. We would rather say that plainly than bury it in an ingredient list.

If tallow is new to you: it is the fat from grass-fed cattle, gently melted and filtered until it sets as a mild, near-white solid. People cooked with it and put it on their skin for centuries before it went out of fashion. The reason we build on it is that its fatty acids, mostly oleic, palmitic and stearic, are close to the ones your own skin makes, so it tends to absorb rather than sit on the surface. It is also a by-product of the beef industry rather than a reason to farm anything.

There is more on why we chose it in Why Tallow above, in Ingredients, and in our story.

It goes on as an oil and settles to a low-shine finish within a minute or two. It is richer than a lotion, so the honest answer is that it will feel greasy if you use a lotion-sized amount.

Start with about a grain of rice for your face. Warm it between your fingertips until it turns from solid to oil, then press it into skin rather than rubbing it in. Dry or wind-worn skin will take more, and hands, elbows and heels will take a lot more. If it still feels heavy after a few minutes, that is the signal to use less next time, not to use it less often.

A light one, and it fades within a few minutes of going on. It is a soft, sharp citrus, closer to a clementine and a grapefruit than to a perfume counter.

The scent comes from real yuja extract, one of the six things in the jar, rather than from a fragrance blend added at the end. That means we cannot make it identical from batch to batch, because fruit is not identical from harvest to harvest. It also means there is no separate parfum in the formula. If you are sensitive to citrus, patch test first.

Yes, and it costs you two days. Put a small amount on the inside of your forearm or just behind your ear, leave it for 24 to 48 hours, and look for redness, itching, stinging or small bumps before you put it on your face.

This matters more than usual with a tallow balm for two reasons. People who are sensitive to citrus can react to the yuja, and a small number of people carry an allergy to mammalian products, including alpha-gal syndrome, which is usually picked up from a tick bite and can make beef-derived ingredients a problem. If you know you react to beef, this is not the product for you. Stop using it if anything irritates, and talk to a doctor or a dermatologist if you are unsure.

It depends on your skin, and we would rather be straight with you than promise it will not. Tallow suits dry, tight and barrier-damaged skin very well. If you are oily or acne-prone, rich occlusive balms are hit and miss, and this one is no different.

If that is you and you still want to try it, two things help: use it on body, hands and the dry patches rather than all over your face, and give a patch test a full 48 hours. A balm like this is also easier to get on with in cold, dry weather than in humidity.

Yes. Yuja is the first release in a Korean-inspired series, with Green Tea, Camellia, Mugwort, Centella and Ginseng formulas to follow.

Each one keeps the same grass-fed tallow base and changes the botanical, so you can pick the one that suits your skin without relearning how the product behaves. We are releasing them one at a time rather than launching a whole shelf at once, because each formula gets the same work the first one did. You can read what we are trying to do in our story.