Will I smell like a cow?
- Anat Edwy
Some people have commented that our PURE Tallow and Emu/Ostrich creams have a faint beefy smell.
Yes, we know, and there’s a good reason for that:
Tallow is a beef kidney fat (suet) rendered slowly and gently to produce a nutrient-rich tallow that resembles our skin’s natural fats.
Tallow will always have a flavour/scent, not because it’s dirty, but because It’s a nutrient-laden animal fat, not standardised, bleached and deodorised fat that was treated in a lab with unwanted chemicals and procedures.
During the rendering process, we cleanse the tallow of all impurities but refrain from further deodorising it. This process is lengthy and expensive, as you lose a lot of tallow at every step. Most importantly, it also removes the super-important nutrients/goodness that benefit the skin, making it almost a sterile fat.
So this is something we’ll never do.
We believe it’s crucial to maintain as many nutrients as possible to have a great product that benefits all skin types, including sensitive skin.
The slight beefy smell you smell during the application disappears within a few minutes, and we believe it’s a minimal price to pay for such a nutrient-rich product that benefits your skin and your health.
I compare it to refined shea butter vs. non-refined. Refined shea butter is white and homogenised, has a slight smell, and doesn’t have the full benefits of non-refined shea butter, which is different in colour, has a smoky aroma, and has much goodness that is stripped when refining the shea.
More factors contribute to undeodorised tallow and its smell.
Each batch of tallow we render is sourced from different breeds of grass-fed and finished cattle grown on different pastures around New Zealand.
Winemakers have an interesting term—‘Terroir’, derived from the French word for earth, ‘Terre’, and broadly refers to ‘a sense of place’. It expresses the idea that a wine’s character is influenced by where its grapes were grown, including the local soil, climate, topography, and even bacteria in a specific site.
Like grapes grown in different areas can tell you the story of their ‘Terroir’, the grass-fed/finished tallow tells you the story of the pasture the cow grazed on, as each pasture has a different nutrient profile, and pasture quality has a significant effect on the performance of grazing animals. “Intake and nutritive value of pasture are major determinants of live weight gain, milk production, health and reproductive performance of livestock.”*
So, each ‘finalised’ tallow is unique and has a slightly different nutrient profile, something you can easily see when looking at the colour of the tallow, which varies in each new batch, depending on the amount of carotene in the fat.
Some fat will be light yellow, some white with a yellow hue, and some orange.
So, when maintaining as many nutrients as possible in the tallow, a beefy smell is pretty much inevitable.
We get requests to add essential oils to our PURE range to mask the slight smell, but we refrain from doing so because the PURE range was designed to be salicylate-free, and all essential oils contain high levels of salicylates. When applying the cream/moisturiser, you might smell the residual smell that will disappear quickly, but all the goodness will stay and nourish your skin deeply as both Emu oil and Ostrich oil possess a uniquely high transdermal ability to penetrate the skin barrier and carry the goodness of nutrients into our bloodstream, gently healing it from inside out.
Most other companies know the “trick” of adding scents to mask the smell. When done “right”, the smell of tallow won’t be as noticeable.
We also have scented tallow products - such as From Top To Toe—Whole Body Moisturising Cream and Nourish & Restore Day & Night Face Cream. Both are beautifully scented with essential oils and suit all skin types.
But if you have sensitive skin and plant materials are a trigger that creates havoc in your body, enjoy the pure goodness of Tallow/Ostrich Oil and Emu Oil, ingredients that promote deep natural healing by giving you goodness without burdening your overall health.
And a bit of smell that quickly disappears is a small price to pay.
* M.G. LAMBERT and A.J. LITHERLAND, A practitioners guide to pasture quality, (2000)