You Are What You Eat. So Are They.

There is a saying that you are what you eat.

When you make skincare from animal fat, the more useful version might be: you are putting on what they ate.

That is why I care about grass-fed and finished tallow.

Not because it sounds nice on a label. Not because I think we need more buzzwords in beauty. And definitely not because I am interested in pretending all tallow is the same once it has been whipped into a pretty jar.

It is not.

The diet of the animal changes the fat.

And the fat is the whole point.

Cattle are ruminants. They are built to eat grass. When they are raised on pasture from start to finish, the fatty-acid profile of their meat and fat looks different from cattle that are grain-finished.

A 2026 study in the Journal of Animal Science compared 337 commercial beef samples from North American grass-finished and grain-finished systems. The grass-finished samples had higher average levels of CLA, omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, and DPA.

That is not a tiny, meaningless difference.

CLA, or conjugated linoleic acid, is a naturally occurring fatty acid found in the fat of ruminant animals like cattle. It is not a trendy ingredient somebody dreamed up in a lab so they could charge you more for a serum. It is one of the things researchers pay attention to when they compare pasture-raised and grain-finished animals.

Why? Because CLA is part of the natural makeup of the fat itself. It has been studied for its role in inflammatory processes and skin-barrier biology, which is interesting when you make skincare from animal fat. That does not turn a jar of balm into medicine. It does mean the source of the fat is worth more than a shrug.

Omega-3 and omega-6 are also fatty acids. You have probably heard of omega-3 in fish oil, but they show up in animal fat too. Both are part of the lipid story researchers look at when they study fat.

You do not need to memorize a fatty-acid chart to understand the point: pasture from start to finish leaves the fat different than a grain-heavy finish.

A balm's job is still simple. It moisturizes and softens dry-feeling skin. But when tallow is the foundation of the product, we care about what built that fat long before it reached the jar.

And honestly, conventional grain is not exactly grown in a charming little backyard garden. Grain-heavy feed systems can involve industrial monocrops and synthetic herbicides. That is not the farming system we chose to build Bare around.

Again, those are averages. Farms are real places, not factory settings. Breed, season, pasture, and management all make a difference. I am not going to pretend every animal has the exact same fatty-acid profile, because that would be nonsense.

But the pattern is not nonsense.

The finish matters.

A cow can spend much of its life on pasture and still be grain-finished at the end. That final stretch is often where cattle are moved to a grain-heavy diet to gain weight more quickly. It is common. It is efficient. And it changes the material we are working with.

That is why "grass-fed" is not the whole story for me.

I want to know whether the cattle were pasture-raised from start to finish. I want to know whether they were confined. I want to know what the farm actually does, not just what fits neatly on the front of a label.

Because if we are going to put animal fat on our skin, we should care about the animal, the farm, and the fat itself.

This is where people sometimes assume I am trying to make a jar of balm sound like medicine.

I am not.

Bare products are skincare. They are made to moisturize, soften dry-feeling skin, and feel good to use. They are not a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or a replacement for medical care.

But saying that does not mean the ingredient story is irrelevant.

Fatty acids are part of what makes fat fat. They are not decorative. They are not marketing fluff somebody stapled onto a jar after the fact. When a product is built around tallow, the quality and makeup of that tallow are part of the product.

So yes, I care about CLA.

I care about the omega-3 profile.

I care about a source that did not begin with a grain-heavy finishing system and then get marketed back to us as though the final diet does not matter.

And I care about being able to explain why.

At Bare, our tallow comes from Brenneman Farms in Jay County, Indiana. Their cattle are raised on pasture in free-range conditions from start to finish. Their pastures and forage are organically managed without chemical fertilizers or herbicides, and the cattle are raised without added hormones, steroids, or fed antibiotics.

That is not a random list of words we borrowed because they sound good.

That is our standard.

I do not need every brand to make the same choices we make. I do not need every person to care about this at the exact level I do.

But I am not going to act like the diet of the animal does not matter just because it would make the story easier.

It does matter.

You are what you eat.

And in this case, so is the tallow.

Jaimie Rae, Founder
Bare Tallow Co.

Varre, J. V., Statham, T., Smith, A. F., et al. (2026). Nutritional composition of beef: a comparison of commercial North American grass- and grain-finishing systems. Journal of Animal Science, 104, skaf436. Read the study