Beef Tallow for Skin: 77 Trials Could Not Show One Moisturiser Beats Another. Tallow Has 19.
Let us be fair to beef tallow before we are unfair to the people selling it.
It is a fat. Fats sit on skin and slow water escaping from it. If you have been rubbing tallow on dry patches and your dry patches got better, you did not imagine that, and nothing here is going to tell you otherwise.
The question this page is about is narrower and much more interesting: is tallow better than the moisturiser you were using before?
Because that is the actual claim. Nobody is going viral saying “this works roughly as well as the cream in your bathroom cabinet”.
What has been studied
Two teams have now gone looking. In 2024, researchers ran a formal scoping review of everything published on tallow and skin. They screened 147 studies and found 19 that qualified — a mix of comparative work, basic science, and animal studies. [1]
| Question | Answer |
| Studies of tallow and skin | 19, from 147 screened |
| Tallow as a cosmetic, in humans | named as a research gap |
| Side effects | the objective with the most disagreement between sources |
| Who is making the claims | mostly people with a financial interest and no health credentials |
Their conclusion is unusually direct for a review. There are, in their words, significant research gaps in how it can be used on human skin, and what is needed is research geared towards tallow as a cosmetic product in humans.
Which is a polite way of saying the thing being sold to you is the thing nobody has tested.
Someone went and read the posts
The second study is the one we find genuinely useful, because instead of studying tallow it studied the claims. In 2025 a dermatology team took posts about beef tallow skincare from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok and analysed what they asserted, what they cited, and who was posting. [2]
Three findings, and they compound.
One. Claims that tallow treats acne, atopic dermatitis and psoriasis were common — and largely lacked cited evidence. Not weak evidence. No citation at all.
Two. The majority of posts promoting tallow showed financial bias, and were uploaded by people without healthcare credentials.
Three, and this is the structural one. Most of the evidence that does get pointed at is evidence about tallow’s ingredients rather than about tallow.
That third move is worth learning to spot, because it is everywhere. A fat contains certain fatty acids; certain fatty acids have been studied; therefore the fat works. It is the same reasoning that would let you claim a brownie is a health food because cocoa flavanols have a literature. Ingredients are not products, and the product is what you are putting on your face.
The comparison that ends the argument
Here is where it gets properly interesting, and it is not really about tallow at all.
Moisturising for eczema has been studied to death. A Cochrane review pooled 77 trials and 6,603 people. Moisturisers beat using nothing, and convincingly: fewer flares, and the median time before a flare went from 30 days to 180. People needed about 9 grams less steroid cream to get the same result. The evidence on investigator-assessed severity was graded high quality, which is rare. [3]
So: moisturising works. Properly established, and worth knowing.
And then the reviewers add one sentence:
“We did not find reliable evidence that one moisturiser is better than another.” [3]
Seventy-seven trials. Six and a half thousand people. Creams, ointments, urea, glycerol, oat, proprietary formulations — and no winner.
That is the context tallow has to be judged in. The field cannot demonstrate that any moisturiser outperforms any other, even for the ones with dozens of trials each. Tallow arrives at that table with 19 studies, most of them not about using it as a cosmetic, and claims to be the best one.
What about the risks?
We are not going to overstate this, because the honest answer is that nobody knows properly.
The scoping review looked specifically for side effects of topical tallow, and reported that this was the question with the most disagreement between sources. Their recommendation is for more research with controlled variables on exactly this point. [1]
So: not a documented danger, and not a clean bill of health either. An open question, reported as one.
The verdict
Unsupported. Not because tallow does nothing — it is a fat, it will occlude, and occlusion helps dry skin. Because the specific claims being made for it, that it treats acne and eczema and psoriasis and outperforms other moisturisers, are made almost entirely without citation, mostly by people who profit from them and hold no health credentials, and rest on studies of ingredients rather than of the product.
The most useful thing in this whole literature is the Cochrane sentence, and it applies to everything on the shelf: moisturising helps, and nobody has ever shown that a particular moisturiser is the one. Which means the cheapest one you will actually keep using is a defensible choice — and if that happens to be a jar of rendered beef fat, it is not the tallow doing something special.
If you have persistent acne, eczema or psoriasis, those are diagnosable conditions with treatments that have beaten placebo in trials. A dermatologist is a better bet than a jar.
One last thing worth naming, because it explains the timing. Tallow did not become popular on its own merits — it rode in on the backlash against seed oils. A lot of what looks like enthusiasm for animal fat is really hostility to the alternative, and those are different arguments that deserve to be checked separately. We checked that one too.
Related: collagen, where the skin evidence is genuinely real but narrower than advertised, and castor oil packs and lymphatic drainage massage — the same shape of promise, that something natural applied to the outside fixes the inside.
If you want to know what earns each rating, we wrote down how we read a study, and everything we have checked is in one place.
