Why I Started Making Tallow Balm

I wish I could say my story was heroic.

That I was so frustrated with skincare I needed to change it. That there was some life changing epiphany or spiritual awakening in the mountains.

There wasn’t.

I’ve used the same moisturizer for over thirty years. I barely wear makeup. I honestly do not think about skincare very much.

My story starts somewhere else entirely.

I wanted to make pie.
I wanted to tin meat.
I wanted to live in my kitchen.

At some point I found a beat-up KitchenAid mixer sitting on the curb. I literally watched somebody throw it away. I ran over and grabbed it.

I brought it home, took it apart, fixed it, cleaned it, regreased it, repainted it.

   

Her name is Gretchen.

I think that was the beginning of whatever this became.

My brain latches onto things with the force of a freight train. For years I’ve been obsessed with metabolic disease, industrial food systems, and the strange relationship modern life has with the human body. Especially fat.

Not in a diet culture way.

More in a “how did we become so disconnected from basic materials?” kind of way.

Fat became fascinating to me because modern culture seems deeply confused by it. We fear it, engineer around it, process it beyond recognition, then act surprised when everything feels vaguely broken.

So I taught myself to render fat.

I started with lard because I wanted to fry chicken in something I understood from beginning to end. That’s really it.

And honestly, that fried chicken is the best I’ve ever eaten.

Then came charcuterie. Sausage making. Braunschweiger. Mortadella. Spam. Hot dogs. I butchered a cow shoulder in my kitchen. Found a free smoker on Facebook Marketplace. Read old cookbooks. Learned preservation methods. Burned things. Screwed things up. Tried again.

   

At some point I trimmed a brisket and ended up staring at an absurd pile of fat on my cutting board.

I rendered it because I didn’t want to waste it.

Then I cooked with it constantly.

Then I became obsessed with beef fat specifically.

Texture.
Smell.
Behavior.
Structure.
How different rendering temperatures changed everything.

I kept accidentally building an entire philosophy around sausage making and rendered beef fat.

Then something strange happened.

The knuckle pad on my middle finger started disappearing.

A knuckle pad is a thickening of skin over a joint. I’ve had one since I was a little kid. Sometimes it cracks open and bleeds. I’ve spent most of my life embarrassed by it.

Dermatologists never helped much.

But my hands were in rendered beef fat every day at that point.

So naturally I started researching.

Then my brain tied it back to skin as a metabolic organ. Barrier function. Water loss. Lipids. Texture. Inflammation. Everything started connecting into one giant rabbit hole.

That was the moment Sig & Fairy’s quietly began forming in the background.

Not because I thought I had discovered miracle skincare.

Mostly because I started wondering:

Could I make an extremely good balm from materials I respected?

Not trendy materials.
Not marketing materials.

Real ones.

So I started whipping tallow balm.