Some Things Cannot Be Duped

I am not anti-dupe.

There are plenty of things in life where buying the less expensive version makes perfect sense. A white tee is a white tee. A lip color is a lip color. If you find a candle that smells almost exactly like the expensive one and costs half as much, I support the decision completely.

Sometimes you are paying for the name. Sometimes you are paying for packaging. Sometimes you are paying for a very pretty campaign and a celebrity who has somehow convinced us all that she personally approves of the lotion.

That is just how it goes.

But tallow is a little different.

With most beauty products, there are a lot of ingredients working together. The formula may have twenty, thirty, or forty things in it, each doing a small job. A dupe can get close because it is copying the overall experience: the texture, the scent, the way it sits on skin, the look of the packaging.

A tallow balm is not built that way.

Tallow is the main event. It is the thing the whole product is built around. So when you are comparing one tallow balm to another, it is worth looking beyond whether the jar is cute or the price is lower.

The useful question is simple: where did the tallow come from?

A lower price does not automatically make a product bad, and a higher price does not automatically make it good.

Products can look similar on the outside and still come from completely different starting points.

If a brand is built around tallow, it is fair to ask what kind. Were the cattle pasture-raised and grass-finished from start to finish? Were they confined? Does the brand know the farm? Can it tell you how the pastures were managed, or does the story stop at "grass-fed"?

Those answers matter to us because we have made tallow the foundation of Bare.

Our tallow comes from Brenneman Farms in Jay County, Indiana. Their cattle are pasture-raised from start to finish, not kept in confinement conditions. Their pastures and forage are organically managed without chemical fertilizers or herbicides, and the cattle are raised without added hormones, steroids, or fed antibiotics. We can tell you that because we know where it comes from.

That is the difference I want people to understand.

Not "ours is better because we said so."

Not "do not buy anything else."

Just this: when one ingredient makes up the heart of a product, the source of that ingredient is worth knowing.

We are getting better at asking that question in general. We want to know where our food came from. We want to know who made our clothes. We want to know whether a company is saying something real or just picking the words that look best on a label.

Beauty should not be excluded from that.

You can start by reading one sentence past the front of the jar.

What is the main ingredient? Where did it come from? Is the brand willing to tell you?

That is enough to start.

A good dupe can be a smart buy. I will never argue with that.

But a source is not packaging. It is not a scent profile. It is not something you can copy by putting a similar-looking balm in a similar-looking jar.

It is a choice made long before the product gets to your bathroom counter.

And for Bare, it is a choice we are happy to tell you about.

Jaimie Rae, Founder
Bare Tallow Co.