Tallow vs. lotion — a brief history.

If you walk into a drugstore today and look at the body-care aisle, you'll see thousands of bottles. Almost every one of them is mostly water. The active ingredients are suspended in that water with emulsifiers, preservatives, thickeners, and pH adjusters. The bottle is designed for that liquid format — pump dispenser, squeeze tube, or jar.

Two hundred years ago, this aisle didn't exist.

Body care, until well into the 1800s, was made at home or in small apothecaries. The base was almost always an animal fat or vegetable oil. Tallow was the most common in temperate climates because cattle were plentiful. Lard (pork fat) was second. Lanolin (from wool) was used in colder climates. Olive oil in the Mediterranean. Coconut oil in the tropics.

These products were balms, not lotions. Solid at room temperature, melting on contact with skin, applied with the fingers, stored in jars or tins. They lasted for months without refrigeration. They didn't grow microbes because there was no water in them for microbes to grow in.

The shift to water-based lotions happened over about eighty years, from roughly 1860 to 1940. Several things drove it.

First: petroleum. Petroleum byproducts — petrolatum (Vaseline, introduced 1872), mineral oil, paraffin — became extraordinarily cheap after the oil boom of the late 19th century. They were also functionally similar to animal fats in some ways: occlusive, stable, slow to oxidise. The cosmetics industry began substituting petroleum derivatives for animal fats because petroleum was cheaper and more standardised.

Second: emulsion chemistry. The early 20th century saw rapid progress in formulating stable water-in-oil and oil-in-water emulsions. This made it possible to suspend an oil in water (a lotion) or water in an oil (a cream) reliably enough to manufacture at scale. The lotion format was lighter, less greasy, easier to pour, easier to package — all advantages for industrial production.

Third: marketing. The cosmetics industry was professionalising rapidly. Brands like Pond's, Nivea, and Vaseline established themselves with claims of science and modernity. Tallow, an ancient ingredient, was rebranded as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. The cultural narrative shifted: lotion was modern, balm was peasant-class.

By 1950, almost no mainstream body-care product contained animal fat. By 2000, most consumers had never heard the word 'tallow' outside a culinary context.

The pendulum is swinging back. Not for everyone, and not all at once, but a growing number of people are noticing that the formulas their great-grandmothers used worked well, had clean ingredient lists, and didn't require a chemistry degree to understand. Tallow-based skincare is the leading edge of that return.

We aren't claiming Sunnbalm is 'going back to the old ways.' We're claiming we picked the four ingredients that have the longest track record in body care — three of them (tallow, beeswax, zinc oxide) older than written history, one of them (cocoa) old as agriculture itself — and we combined them in a way the cosmetics industry hasn't bothered with in a hundred years.