This soft, creamy, 4-ingredient body butter stars trendy beef tallow. If you’ve been looking for a rich, spreadable DIY that uses a lot of tallow, look no further!

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The ingredients

Beef tallow

The bulk of this formulation is beef tallow; a solid creamy fat rendered from the fat of cows. I highly recommend using grass fed tallow that’s been rendered enough times to remove the beefy smell. If your tallow smells like meat, your finished butter will, too.

I’ve written a ginormous post all about making skincare with tallow, including digging into many of the claims made about its skincare benefits. Please read that if you want to learn more.

Sunflower oil

I’ve included some sunflower oil to soften the tallow and help balance our formula’s fatty acid profile. Beef tallow naturally contains high amounts of stearic (13–35%), palmitic (26–30%), and oleic acids (34–47%)—but it’s much lower in linoleic acid (~3%), a fatty acid that’s especially beneficial for skin barrier health.

That’s where sunflower oil comes in. It’s rich in linoleic acid (~55%), helping to improve the fatty acid blend of this butter. To ensure you’re getting that linoleic acid boost, make sure you’re using regular sunflower oil, not the high oleic acid version that’s often sold for soap making.

If you want to swap out the sunflower oil, safflower oil or grapeseed oil would be my top choices.

Vitamin E

Vitamin E (a potent antioxidant) helps extend the shelf life of the formulation by delaying rancidicity, a.k.a. oxidization.

Peppermint essential oil

For a fresh minty pop (and to help mask any meaty whiffs from the tallow), I’ve included some peppermint essential oil. This doesn’t completely erase the tallow scent with the tallow I’ve used, but it helps disguise and distract from it. You can substitute another essential oil or fragrance oil if you prefer, just ensure it’s safe at 1% in IFRA category 5A products. If your tallow has a noticeably meaty smell recommend choosing a fairly assertive essential oil that won’t clash too badly with the smell of meat.

If you intend to use this butter on your face, that would make it an IFRA category 5B product. I’d recommend using less essential oil, and I probably wouldn’t choose refreshing, chilly peppermint.

Preventing gritty tallow

This tallow butter is basically beef tallow that’s been softened with sunflower oil. The biggest challenge with solid formulations that get their solid-ness from a soft buttery ingredient like tallow, shea butter, or mango butter is getting it to set up properly. If you don’t cool mixtures like this the right way, they’ll be too soft as well as mealy, grainy, or gritty. Yick.

To ensure the finished butter is nice and smooth, we’ll cool this formulation to trace in an ice bath before pouring it into a jar or tin to set up at room temperature. This ensures it cools evenly so the solid fatty acids can’t clump together, making the finished product gritty.

If you let this butter set up without an ice bath it’ll turn out like this—mealy and uneven.

Relevant links & further reading

• Tallow and DIY skincare: Everything you need to know
• Tallow (beef) in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Sunflower Oil in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Tocopherol (Vitamin E) in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Troubleshooting anhydrous formulations:
  • Why is my body butter grainy?
  • Why is my body butter greasy?
  • Why is my body butter grainy?
• How long will ______ last? What is its shelf life? in the Humblebee & Me FAQ
• More hot poured body butter formulations:
  • Kombo Shea Butter Balm
  • Passionfruit Coconut Vegan Body Butter
  • Mango Mango Body Butter
  • Eucalyptus Mint Foot Butter
• More tallow formulations:
  • Tallow Body Butter Bars
  • Light Tallow Hand Lotion
  • Rustic Clay Soap
  • Almond Oat Soap
  • Argan Rose Soap
  • Lavender Aloe Soap

Creamy Tallow Butter

Heated phase
40.8g | 68% beef tallow
18g | 30% sunflower seed oil (USA / Canada / UK / NZ)

Cool down phase
0.6g | 1% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)
0.6g | 1% peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada)

Prepare a water bath by bringing about 3cm/1″ of water to a bare simmer over low to medium-low heat in a small saucepan.

Weigh the heated phase ingredients into a thick, heat-resistant glass measuring cup (we want heavy glass rather than a thinner beaker to make tracing the butter easier). Place the measuring cup in your prepared water bath to melt everything through.

While the heated phase melts, prepare an ice bath. Take a bowl that is large enough to accommodate the container the heated phase is melting in, and fill it about halfway with ice cubes and cold water.

After about 20–30 minutes everything should be completely melted through. Remove the water bath from the heat, remove the measuring cup from the water bath, and dry it off with a dishtowel. Set the measuring cup on a towel or hot pad to insulate it from the counter and stir with a flexible silicone spatula to combine everything and allow the glass to cool for a minute or two.

Once the measuring cup has had a chance to cool down a bit, place it in the ice bath stir constantly for about thirty seconds to begin cooling the melted fats. Remove the measuring cup from the water bath and add the cool down phase. Stir to incorporate.

Continue stirring the mixture in the ice bath until you reach a light “trace”—the mixture should be slightly hazy and you should be able to see some small bubbles trapped in it. Refer to the video to see it in action! This part can be a bit tricky as too much viscosity will mean the mixture won’t pour into the container nicely, so be careful and make sure your packing is standing by.

Once you reach trace you can now pour the product into its container and leave it on the counter to set up. I used a 50mL screw-top jar from YellowBee.

Use as you’d use any body butter. Enjoy!

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this product does not contain any water, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the formulation, you will get a different final product than I did.

• As I’ve provided this formulation in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams, this formulation will make 60g (roughly 2 oz).
• To learn more about the ingredients used in this formulation, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
• You can use a soft plant based butter like shea, mango, or murumuru instead of the tallow (though this does rather defeat the point of making a tallow butter!). This swap will change the consistency of the final butter.
• You can substitute another lightweight oil, linoleic-acid rich oil like safflower or grapeseed instead of sunflower seed oil
• If you’d like to use a different essential oil, please read this.

Watch for tiny bubbles and a bit of haziness before pouring.

Troubleshooting

It becomes chunky as you’re tracing it

This means it is cooling too quickly. Gently re-melt it, making sure the measuring cup gets fully warm, and then slow things down by using the ice bath less next time.

It doesn’t set up properly

Experiment with different levels of trace and different temperatures for the final cooling (the fridge or freezer instead of the counter).

It’s too soft or too hard

If the butter is far too soft, swap 1–5% of the sunflower oil for either stearic acid or C10-18 Triglycerides (aka Butter Pearls, a blend of stearic and palmitic acids) to harden it up. You could also try 1–3% of a wax.

If it’s only a tiny bit too soft, just use more tallow and less sunflower oil.

If the butter is too hard, use more sunflower oil and less tallow.