Tallow vs. Shea vs. Petrolatum: The Truth About Occlusives

Petroleum jelly seals water into skin better than anything else you can buy. That is the one thing it does, and it does it by sitting on your face as a refined fraction of crude oil.

We're not willing to do that, and we built a company around not doing it. You don't need a clinical trial to decide you'd rather not wear an oil refinery byproduct. But you should know what you're trading, so here's the comparison with the evidence attached, including the parts that don't flatter tallow. We make a tallow balm. That's the bias, stated once.

What an Occlusive Actually Does

An occlusive is a water-resistant film. You spread a fat or a wax over the surface of the skin, and the water that skin is always losing to the air (transepidermal water loss, or TEWL) slows down. Nothing gets added. Your own water just stays put longer.

That's the whole mechanism, which is why occlusives are excellent for dry skin and do very little for anything else. Humectants, like the raw honey in our balm, pull water toward the skin instead. Emollients sit between the surface cells and make skin feel smooth. Most decent moisturizers do some of each. Tallow, shea butter and petrolatum are all mainly in the first category.

Here's the part the sealing numbers hide: a film is all petrolatum is. Tallow and shea are fats built from the same fatty acid families your own barrier lipids are made of, so they sit in the skin's own chemistry rather than on top of it as an inert layer. Whether that produces a measurable advantage in a trial is unsettled. That it is a different kind of ingredient is not.

Is Tallow an Occlusive?

Yes. It's a solid animal fat at room temperature, made up mostly of oleic, palmitic and stearic acid, which is also roughly the fatty acid mix in your skin's own lipids. These are molecules skin already handles.

We're going to be straight about the research, because the category mostly isn't. The paper everyone cites is a 2024 scoping review in Cureus¹, and a scoping review is a survey of what exists, not a trial. It pulled 19 studies, most of them animal or basic-science work rather than tests on people. It reports that tallow "was found to offer hydrating and moisturizing properties." The very next sentence reports that pumpkin seed oil and linoleic acid "were found to offer superior hydrating and moisturizing benefits than tallow" in the comparative studies it looked at. On side effects the papers disagreed: some reported no irritation, one classified tallow a severe irritant, in a study using a solvent the authors note may have driven that result.

So anyone selling you tallow as clinically proven is overselling. The honest case for it is that it's a food byproduct, compositionally close to the fats your skin makes, and it didn't come out of a refinery. That case doesn't need a trial.

Is Shea Butter an Occlusive?

Yes, and we have no argument with it. Shea is largely oleic and stearic acid, plus a small fraction of unsaponifiables (triterpenes, tocopherols, phenols). It's a real plant fat with a long history.

Its clinical record is thinner than its reputation, which is worth knowing if someone quotes a study at you. The one usually cited is a 2015 trial in the Hong Kong Medical Journal²: 34 children with atopic dermatitis used a cream and cleanser containing a lipid complex with shea butter extract for four weeks. Roughly three quarters rated the cream "very good" or "good". That's an acceptability score, not a measure of how well it worked, and the paper concluded the shea extract cream performed no differently from a ceramide product.

Shea and tallow are on the same side of the line that matters to us. Both are renewable, both come from something that was already being grown or raised, and neither is drilled.

Petrolatum: Seals Best, Brings Nothing

Petrolatum blocks water loss better than anything else on a drugstore shelf, which is why barrier researchers use it as the benchmark. Dermatologists have recommended it for decades because it works and almost nobody reacts to it. We're not going to pretend it doesn't work.

It's also busier than its "inert" reputation suggests. A 2016 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology³ applied petrolatum under occlusion to 36 healthy volunteers and 13 people with moderate atopic dermatitis. Antimicrobial peptide genes went up sharply. So did filaggrin and loricrin, two proteins skin uses to build its own barrier. The outer layer got thicker.

And it brings nothing with it. No fatty acids your skin can use, no vitamins, nothing that was ever alive. It's a non-renewable product of oil extraction, it doesn't break down, and the supply chain behind it is the petrochemical industry. Those are the facts about what it is, and they're the reason we don't formulate with it. That isn't a scientific claim. It's a decision about what we're willing to sell.

Is petroleum the same as petrolatum?

Same origin, different refinement. Petroleum is crude oil. Petrolatum is a refined, decolorized fraction of it, and cosmetic grades are purified to remove the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that make crude oil dangerous. That purification is real and it's why cosmetic-grade petrolatum is considered safe to use.

It also means the safety of what you're putting on your face depends entirely on how well somebody else refined it. We'd rather the answer not depend on that.

Europe treats that as a legal question rather than a matter of trust. In the EU, petrolatum is classified as a carcinogen and barred from cosmetics unless the maker can document its full refining history and show the feedstock was not carcinogenic. The US has no equivalent requirement for cosmetics. That is a gap in what the law compels, not proof that any particular jar is contaminated, and the large US refiners hold the same documentation and will hand it over if you ask. But the proof is optional here. And the question only comes up because the raw material is crude oil.

Where Natural Occlusives Beat Petrolatum, and Where They Don't

Petrolatum wins on raw occlusion and it wins on volume of research. We'll say that plainly, and we'll also say that any ranked table telling you tallow holds in 80 to 90 percent of your skin's water and petrolatum 98 is reciting figures that were never measured against each other in one study. Those tables are everywhere and they're invented.

What natural fats offer is a different proposition, not a higher score on the same test. They're built from the fatty acid families your skin lipids are made of. They carry other things with them: vitamins in tallow, unsaponifiables in shea, honey if the formula includes it. They come from food and farming rather than drilling. And they feel like something you'd choose to put on your face, which matters more than it sounds, because the moisturizer that helps is the one you keep using.

Who This Balm Is For, and Who It Isn't

It's For You If:

• Your skin is dry or mature and a thin lotion has stopped lasting through the day
• You'd rather not put a petroleum product on your skin, and you don't need a study to justify that
• You want a short ingredient list you can read and understand
• You want scent and texture from a moisturizer, not just function

It Isn't If:

• You react to fragrance or essential oils. Ours is scented with sweet orange peel oil and five other botanical oils, there's no unscented version, and botanical oils are a common contact sensitizer. If that's your skin, this isn't your balm, and we'd rather say that than sell you one you'll regret
• A doctor has prescribed a specific ointment for a specific problem. Use what they gave you

Everything else points one way. Ours is the Citrus & Honey Tallow Balm: grass-fed and finished beef suet, organic olive oil, beeswax, raw manuka honey, royal jelly, and a citrus-led blend of botanical oils. Eleven ingredients, none of them drilled out of the ground.

References

1. Russell, M. F., Sandhu, M., Vail, M., Haran, C., Batool, U., & Leo, J. (2024). Tallow, rendered animal fat, and its biocompatibility with skin: A scoping review. Cureus, 16(5), e60981. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.60981

2. Hon, K. L., Tsang, Y. C., Pong, N. H., Lee, V. W., Luk, N. M., Chow, C. M., & Leung, T. F. (2015). Patient acceptability, efficacy, and skin biophysiology of a cream and cleanser containing lipid complex with shea butter extract versus a ceramide product for eczema. Hong Kong Medical Journal, 21(5), 417-425. https://doi.org/10.12809/hkmj144472

3. Czarnowicki, T., Malajian, D., Khattri, S., et al. (2016). Petrolatum: Barrier repair and antimicrobial responses underlying this "inert" moisturizer. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 137(4), 1091-1102.e7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2015.08.013