Lets talk soap tonight.....tallow soap to be specific. Another question I get a lot is, what is tallow? Why do I use it? What does it do in soap and what can it do for my skin? All handmade soap is made from fat or oil and lye. Tallow is rendered fat, usually from beef or mutton. In the case of my soaps it is beef but a couple of my soaps do use venison or bear, when it is available (my Montana Series Soaps). However those are a very limited soaps. I render the fat myself and make tallow. To render fat means to melt it or cook it down and take all of the impurities out of it, so that all you are left with is the tallow or pure fat. This is a process all of its own. Yes, I could purchase tallow and skip this process all together. However, I choose to do this as part of my soap making process because it uses something that might otherwise go to waste if I didn't. I purchase the beef fat from my local butcher at the local market. This not only supports local small business, it keeps waste for going to the landfill and therefore creates some environment friendly practices. Most soapers will choose to use palm oil. The reason for this is the stearic acid in palm oil among other things is high and gives you a good bar of soap. Tallow is also high is stearic, oleic and palmitic acids and doesn't require cutting down a rain forest to get it. Palm oil can be sourced substainably and I do have vegan soaps that I use substainable palm oil in but for me, tallow is a better resource to choose from for the majority of my soaps. It makes more sense to me and matches the person I am and the business I am. I have always been a waste not, want not personality and I have always loved the "old" traditions carried on by my grandmothers before me, going back over 100 years in some cases. I am sure my great great grandmother, if she made soap, wouldn't have used palm oil. The old traditions, those are the ways I have always looked to do the things I do. There are good things in the way we did it then and we might have lost some sight in that knowledge but some of us know, if we look for it, we can learn the reasons it was done that way, the knowledge can live again. So now we are to the question of what does it do in soap and what can it do for my skin? The palmitic and stearic acid in tallow help to make a hard, long lasting soap that produces a creamy, rich lather that is nourishing and moisturizing for the skin. Tallow contains many vitamins such as A, D, K, & E, & B12, as well as minerals, all of which are extremely beneficial for skin. There are more and more people turning back to tallow these days for the benefits it has for the skin. Oleic acid is an omega 9 fatty acid, which is often advertised and added as an ingredient in many cosmetics for the benefits it adds for skin care. If your interested in these articles I will leave some links below. If you have questions about tallow, how it is used or any other questions, please feel free to comment below. And as always thanks for following and reading my post.
https://www.paulaschoice.com/.../how-omega-fatty-acids...
https://thebestorganicskincare.com/omega-3-6-9-benefits.../