If tallow is so great, why don't we just put straight tallow in a jar?

Because we're making skincare.

Not entering an ingredient-purity competition.

Tallow is naturally firm

Tallow is a solid fat at ordinary room temperatures.

That richness is part of what makes it useful.

It can also make straight tallow firmer, waxier and less spreadable than I want for certain products.

Enter jojoba.

Jojoba isn't technically an oil

We call it jojoba oil because that's convenient, but chemically it is primarily a liquid wax ester.

That makes it an interesting formulation ingredient.

It is light, stable and spreads beautifully over the skin.

When we combine it with tallow, we're not trying to dilute the “good stuff.”

We're changing the way the finished product behaves.

Formulation changes experience

Adding jojoba can influence:

• firmness
• glide
• spreadability
• absorption feel
• ease of application
• consistency across temperatures

These sound like cosmetic details.

They are.

This is a cosmetic.

And those details determine whether you actually enjoy putting it on every day.

More ingredients isn't automatically worse

One of the weird things the clean-beauty movement gave us was the assumption that every additional ingredient is suspicious.

A formula with three thoughtfully chosen ingredients is not inherently inferior to one containing one.

Likewise, a twenty-five-ingredient formula isn't inherently sophisticated.

Count tells you almost nothing.

Purpose tells you something.

Why is it there?

That's the question I care about.

What jojoba does not mean

I am not going to tell you jojoba is identical to your sebum.

You'll see versions of that claim everywhere too.

It has some structural similarities to wax esters found in human sebum, which is interesting.

Identical?

No.

Again, reality is interesting enough.

Why this combination makes sense to us

Tallow gives us richness and body.

Jojoba gives us movement.

Together they create a product that spreads easily while retaining the substantial feel we want from tallow skincare.

Then depending on the product, we may formulate further from there.

This is what I mean when I say I care about minimal skincare, not necessarily single-ingredient skincare.

Minimalism isn't refusing to formulate.

It is refusing to add things without a reason.

And every ingredient should earn its place.

You can see it in our jars

• Purist Whipped Body Butter — tallow, jojoba and cacao butter.
• FATBABY — the same three, with a little more jojoba so it's easier to spread in the colder months.
• Purist Face — leaves jojoba out entirely, for faces that don't get along with it.