The Edible Skincare Standard

If you wouldn't eat it, don't wear it.

That's the whole standard. One sentence. No asterisk, no fine print, no chemistry-major footnotes. Every product we make has to clear the same bar: would I let my baby put this in their mouth?

If the answer is no, it doesn't go in the jar. If the answer is "well, technically, in small amounts, with the right preservative system…" — also no. We're not splitting hairs. We're making skincare you could eat. Then we're rubbing it on your face instead.

This is the page that explains exactly what that means, what's in every product, what we refuse to formulate with, and why we think the rest of the industry's "natural" badge has gotten almost meaningless.

What "edible-grade" actually means

Walk into a Whole Foods skincare aisle and you'll see "natural," "clean," "non-toxic," "plant-based," and "from the earth" pasted on bottles full of stuff you would never, ever swallow. Those words mean whatever the brand wants them to mean. There's no FDA definition. No external auditor. No standard.

"Edible-grade" is a tighter bar — and a literal one. It means every ingredient on the label is something you could eat:

• Food-grade or USDA-eligible. The same beef tallow, olive oil, cocoa butter, jojoba, shea, vanilla, and sea buckthorn you'd find in a kitchen, a smoothie, or a baking aisle.
• Approved for consumption. If the FDA classifies it as food, GRAS (generally recognized as safe), or a food additive at the levels we use it, it's eligible. If not, it isn't.
• No "skincare-only" chemistry. No phenoxyethanol, no silicones, no PEGs, no synthetic emulsifiers, no fragrance blends, no acrylate copolymers — nothing whose entire reason for existing is that it makes a cream feel a certain way on skin.

The exception we make — and we'll be transparent about it — is non-nano zinc oxide in our SPF 30 sunscreen. You can't eat zinc oxide for fun, and we wouldn't suggest it. But it's an FDA-approved mineral sunscreen filter, considered safe enough that pediatric dermatologists put it on babies' skin, and it's the only ingredient in there doing the actual UV-blocking. Everything around the zinc — the tallow, jojoba, cocoa butter, shea, sea buckthorn, MCT, arrowroot — is edible. We'll get into this honestly in the table below.

That's the whole framework. Every ingredient either passes the "would I let my baby eat this?" test, or it has a specific, narrow, declared reason it's there (and we tell you upfront).

The Edible Skincare ingredient checklist

Below is every ingredient in every Eat My Face product, what it does, where it comes from, and the baby-test answer. If you've ever read a tallow brand's ingredient list and thought "wait, why is mango butter in here?" — this is for you.

Tallow moisturizers (Original, Vanilla, Nighttime, Baby Momma, After Sun)

Ingredient	Source	Would I let my baby eat this?
Grass-fed beef tallow	Rendered fat from 100% grass-fed cattle	Yes — it's literally cooking fat. Generations of grandmothers fried eggs in it.
Cocoa butter	Pressed from cocoa beans	Yes. It's in chocolate.
Jojoba oil	Cold-pressed jojoba seeds	Yes — food-grade jojoba is safe in small amounts. We use a cosmetic-pressed grade that's the same plant.
Vitamin E (tocopherol)	Sunflower-derived	Yes — it's a vitamin. People take it as a supplement.
Sea buckthorn oil	Pressed from sea buckthorn berries	Yes. It's sold as a nutritional supplement and in juices.
MCT oil	Fractionated coconut	Yes. It's the stuff people stir into their morning coffee.
Arrowroot powder	Ground arrowroot tuber	Yes. It's a baking thickener.
Olive oil (Baby Momma)	Extra-virgin, food-grade	Yes. It's olive oil.
Beeswax (Baby Momma)	Cosmetic-grade beeswax	Yes. Beeswax is GRAS-listed and used in candy glazes.
Aloe (After Sun)	Aloe vera leaf	Yes — inner leaf aloe is sold in juices and gels people drink.
Cucumber (After Sun)	Cucumber extract	Yes. It's a vegetable.
Vanilla (Original, Vanilla)	Real vanilla extract / vanilla bean	Yes. It's a baking ingredient.
Lavender oil (Nighttime)	Steam-distilled lavender	Trace amounts. Used in food flavoring; we use a tiny percentage at safe levels for skin.
Chamomile extract (Nighttime)	German chamomile flower	Yes. People drink it as tea.

Tallow soap bars (Citrus, Mint, Unscented)

Ingredient	Source	Would I let my baby eat this?
Grass-fed beef tallow	Rendered fat from 100% grass-fed cattle	Yes — same cooking fat as our creams.
Shea butter	Pressed from shea nuts	Yes. Edible-grade shea is used in West African cooking.
Saponifying agent (lye, fully reacted)	Sodium hydroxide, fully consumed in the saponification reaction	Honest answer: not as a raw input, but no soap on Earth exists without it. After saponification, there's zero free lye left in the bar — only soap molecules.
Bergamot + sweet orange oil (Citrus)	Cold-pressed citrus peel	Yes — both are food-flavoring oils used in Earl Grey tea, candy, and baked goods.
Peppermint + spearmint oil (Mint)	Steam-distilled mint leaves	Yes — both are food-grade flavoring oils used in gum, tea, and baking.

The Unscented bar is just tallow + shea + saponifying agent. No essential oils, no fragrance, nothing. It's the bar we recommend for the most reactive skin and for newborns.

SPF 30 Mineral Sunscreen

Ingredient	Source	Would I let my baby eat this?
Non-nano zinc oxide (Z-Cote, BASF)	Pharmaceutical-grade mineral, particle size >100nm	The honest exception. No, you wouldn't eat zinc oxide. But it's the FDA-approved mineral SPF active most pediatric dermatologists consider safe for babies. It's the only ingredient doing the UV-blocking job, and we picked the cleanest version that exists.
Grass-fed beef tallow	Same cooking fat	Yes.
Cocoa butter	Cocoa beans	Yes.
Shea butter	Shea nuts	Yes.
Jojoba oil	Jojoba seeds	Yes.
Sea buckthorn oil	Sea buckthorn berries	Yes.
MCT oil	Fractionated coconut	Yes.
Arrowroot powder	Arrowroot tuber	Yes.

That's the entire universe of stuff in every Eat My Face product. No mystery numbers in parentheses. No "and other ingredients."

What we don't put in (and what we'd never need to)

Here's the list we get asked about constantly. None of it is in any Eat My Face product. None of it ever will be.

• Phthalates — plasticizers used to extend synthetic fragrance. Endocrine-disrupting. Hidden in "fragrance" by default.
• Parabens — preservatives (methylparaben, propylparaben, butylparaben). Detected in human breast tissue. We use no synthetic preservatives because our anhydrous, water-free formulas don't need them.
• Synthetic fragrance / "fragrance" / "parfum" — the legal black box that can hide hundreds of undisclosed compounds. If we scent something, we name the actual oil and the actual concentration.
• Methylisothiazolinone (MIT) and methylchloroisothiazolinone (CMIT) — preservatives that triggered a global allergic-contact-dermatitis epidemic in the 2010s.
• BHT and BHA — synthetic antioxidants used to extend shelf life. Banned or restricted as food additives in much of Europe.
• Formaldehyde-releasers — DMDM hydantoin, imidazolidinyl urea, quaternium-15, diazolidinyl urea, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate. Slow-release formaldehyde preservatives. Known sensitizers.
• PEGs and ethoxylated compounds — PEG-7, PEG-100, sodium laureth sulfate. Frequently contaminated with 1,4-dioxane during manufacturing.
• Synthetic emulsifiers — polysorbates, glyceryl stearate SE, ceteareth blends. Required when you mix water and oil. We don't mix water and oil.
• Silicones — dimethicone, cyclopentasiloxane, cyclomethicone. The "slip" you feel in most lotions. Skin can't eat it. Skin can't do anything with it.
• Mineral oil and petrolatum — petroleum-derived occlusives. Cheap, effective, and the opposite of edible.
• Mango butter, emu oil, beeswax-and-essential-oil "balms" — these aren't toxic, but they're not food. Mango butter is non-edible refined cosmetic fat. Emu oil is rendered emu (yes, the bird), with very limited supply chain transparency. We don't need either to make a balm work.

The essential oils question

This is where most "natural" tallow brands quietly compromise — and where edible-grade gets tested.

Walk through a farmer's-market tallow brand and you'll find lavender essential oil, tea tree, eucalyptus, frankincense, geranium, ylang-ylang, peppermint, sweet orange, and "proprietary blends" stacked five and ten deep into a single jar. The marketing language is identical to ours: pure, natural, plant-derived, ancestral.

Here's what's missing from that pitch: essential oils are not food. They're concentrated steam-distilled or cold-pressed terpene extracts — sometimes 70 to 100 times more concentrated than the herb they came from. They're potent. They're bioactive. Some of them are mild irritants and some are known sensitizers (linalool, limonene, citral, eugenol — all common in lavender, citrus, and clove oils — are listed allergens under EU cosmetic regulation 1223/2009).

Our position is simpler:

• If a scent ingredient is a food-grade flavoring oil — bergamot in Earl Grey tea, peppermint in candy, lavender in baking, vanilla in literally everything — we'll use a small amount at safe topical concentration. Nothing exotic. Nothing "blended."
• If you want zero essential oils, our Unscented soap and Baby Momma cream are completely EO-free. That's the recommendation for newborn skin, eczema-prone skin, and anyone who's ever reacted to lavender.
• You will never see a 12-essential-oil "proprietary blend" on an Eat My Face label. That's not skincare. That's perfume in a tallow jar.

The specific essential oils that show up most often on "natural" tallow labels — and the issues we keep running into when we evaluate them:

• Lavender — high in linalool, which oxidizes into a known sensitizer over time. Particularly problematic for eczema-prone skin. We use a tiny percentage in Nighttime cream only, where the calming benefit is the whole point and the dose stays low.
• Tea tree — a strong sensitizer with documented contact dermatitis cases at the concentrations many DIY and small-batch tallow brands use. We don't use it.
• Citrus oils (lemon, sweet orange, grapefruit) — phototoxic. Apply, walk into sun, react. Bergamot in particular contains bergapten unless it's specifically labeled "bergapten-free / FCF." We only use FCF bergamot in the citrus soap, and even there it's a wash-off product.
• Frankincense, myrrh, ylang-ylang, geranium — all listed allergens under EU cosmetic regulation. None earn a spot in our formulas.
• Eucalyptus and rosemary — both contain 1,8-cineole and other terpenes that can be irritating to sensitive skin and unsafe for use around infants. Not in our products.

If you've been using a "natural" tallow product and your skin has felt worse instead of better, the essential oil load is the first place to look. It's almost never the tallow.

Why this matters: skin is more like a stomach than you think

The argument for edible-grade isn't just aesthetic. It's about how skin actually works.

Your skin is the largest organ in your body — about 22 square feet of it on an average adult — and it isn't a brick wall. It's selectively permeable. Lipid-soluble compounds (which most "actives" and many preservatives are) absorb through the stratum corneum and into circulation. The transdermal route is precisely how nicotine patches, hormone patches, and lidocaine creams deliver doses through skin. The FDA's own review of parabens in cosmetics confirms transdermal absorption is real and measurable.

You are, in a meaningful sense, low-dose-eating whatever you put on your face every day for the rest of your life.

That doesn't mean every cosmetic ingredient is dangerous. It means the conservative move — the move you'd make if you were thinking about your kid, or your future grandkid, or your own next 60 years — is to start with stuff your body already recognizes as food. Then add only the small handful of non-food ingredients that have a clear, narrow, declared job (like zinc oxide for UV protection).

That's the case for edible-grade. Not "everything else will kill you." Just: start from food, and earn each exception.

The math on transdermal exposure

Pull up the numbers and the case gets sharper. Most adults apply somewhere between 6 and 12 personal-care products to their skin every day — moisturizer, sunscreen, deodorant, body wash, hand cream, lip balm, hair product. Across a year that's roughly 4 to 8 pounds of cosmetic chemistry pressed against the body's largest organ. Multiply across decades.

You're not "eating" all of it — most molecules sit on the surface or get washed off — but the lipid-soluble fraction (which is most fragrance compounds, most preservatives, and many emulsifiers) absorbs steadily. Researchers have found measurable parabens in human urine across nearly every adult sampled in the US, and the most plausible source is daily personal care.

You don't need to panic about any single ingredient. You do need to think about the cumulative bet you're making.

Edible-grade is a hedge. If we're wrong about a specific ingredient, the downside on something you could eat is small. If a brand using methylisothiazolinone or DMDM hydantoin is wrong about a specific ingredient, the downside is bigger. We'd rather be wrong on the boring side.

How we evaluate every new ingredient

People ask how we decide what makes the cut. Here's the actual filter:

1. Is it food? If the ingredient is recognized as food, food-grade, or GRAS-listed in the FDA database, it clears the first bar. If not, it has to clear the rest of the filter on a clearly declared exception.
2. Does it have a job no edible-grade ingredient can do? Most "skincare-only" ingredients exist because no food-grade option produces the same texture or shelf life cheaply. We don't care about cheap. We care whether tallow + cocoa butter + jojoba can already do the job. They almost always can.
3. Is it on the EU 1223/2009 listed-allergen schedule? Twenty-six fragrance compounds are flagged in EU cosmetic regulation as known sensitizers. We avoid the ones we can avoid; we declare the few we use (in tiny amounts).
4. Could it be contaminated? Some otherwise-fine ingredient classes (PEGs, ethoxylated surfactants) carry a non-trivial risk of 1,4-dioxane contamination during manufacturing. Even at "trace" levels, we'd rather not. Tallow and cocoa butter don't have that problem.
5. Would Jeff put it on his own kids? The final filter. Jeff is the founder. He has skin in the game (literal phrase) and his answer is the answer.

How edible skincare is different from "natural" or "clean" tallow

The tallow space has gotten crowded. Some of it is great. Some of it is selling the same farmhouse aesthetic with very different formulating choices. A quick guide to what to look for:

• The essential oil load. If a tallow brand's product lists three or more essential oils, you're buying a perfume in a tallow base. Lavender + tea tree + frankincense + geranium is not a baby formula. It's an aromatherapy candle.
• "Proprietary blend." If you see this on a tallow label, the brand is hiding the actual fragrance composition. Walk away.
• Mango butter, emu oil, or "exotic" plant butters. Not toxic. Not food. Not consistent with edible-grade. We can make every product without them.
• "Naturally-derived" preservatives. Phenoxyethanol is "naturally derived." So is sodium benzoate. So is potassium sorbate. The word "natural" in cosmetics has near-zero regulatory meaning. We use no synthetic or naturally-derived preservatives because our anhydrous formulas don't need them.
• "Whipped" tallow with water. The whipped texture is great. The water requires a preservative system. Edible-grade can still get there — but it's worth checking what's preserving the water phase. Spoiler: usually it's not edible.

None of this is to say other tallow brands are bad. Many are excellent for what they're trying to do. We're trying to do something narrower: hold an edible-grade line everywhere we can, and tell you exactly when we can't.

The Edible Skincare lineup

Every product. Every edible-grade truth. One list.

If you're new here, the right starting point depends on your skin and your routine. The Original Tallow Moisturizer is our most popular jar and the one most people stay on forever. Sensitive or reactive skin starts with Baby Momma. Anyone with sun-prone skin in spring and summer needs the SPF 30. The soaps are the cheapest way to test the formula philosophy on cleansing skin first. And anyone who wants the no-essential-oil version of everything sticks with Unscented soap and Baby Momma cream.

Frequently asked questions

Are Eat My Face products literally edible?

Almost. Every ingredient in our soaps and moisturizers is food-grade — meaning you could eat them, even if it'd be a weird snack. Our SPF 30 sunscreen contains non-nano zinc oxide, which is an FDA-approved mineral filter, not a food. We're upfront about that one exception. Everything else on every label is something you'd find in a kitchen.

What does "edible-grade" mean?

Every ingredient is food-grade, USDA-eligible, or otherwise approved for human consumption. No skincare-only synthetic chemistry, no fragrance blends, no ingredients designed solely to make a cream feel a certain way. The standard is: would I let my baby eat this?

Are essential oils bad for skin?

Not categorically — but they're not food, and many of the most popular ones (lavender, citrus, tea tree, eucalyptus) are listed allergens under EU cosmetics regulation. We use small amounts of food-grade flavoring oils (vanilla, bergamot, peppermint) at safe topical concentrations, or none at all. We won't formulate "proprietary blends" of a dozen essential oils.

Are there ingredients in Eat My Face products you wouldn't actually eat?

One: non-nano zinc oxide in our SPF 30 sunscreen. It's the only ingredient doing UV protection, it's FDA-approved, it's pharmaceutical-grade (Z-Cote by BASF), and pediatric dermatologists consider it safe for infant skin. Everything else around it in that formula — and every ingredient in every other product — is food-grade.

Why don't you use mango butter, emu oil, or other "natural" tallow staples?

None of them pass the edible-grade bar. Refined mango butter isn't a food. Emu oil is rendered from a bird with limited supply-chain transparency. Both work fine in skincare; neither earns a spot in our jars when grass-fed beef tallow, cocoa butter, jojoba, and shea already do the job using ingredients you can buy at a grocery store.

What about preservatives?

Our moisturizers and balms are anhydrous — there's no water in them. Without water, you don't grow microbes, and you don't need synthetic preservatives. The natural antioxidants in vitamin E and the inherent stability of the lipid base give our products a 12-month shelf life with no parabens, no phenoxyethanol, no formaldehyde-releasers, and nothing else from the cosmetic preservative aisle.

Are baby products held to a different standard?

No — every Eat My Face product is held to the baby standard. That's the whole point of edible-grade. The Baby Momma cream is just the simplest expression of it (four ingredients, no scent), but our adult moisturizers wouldn't fail a baby-safety check either. We don't formulate two tiers.

How is "edible skincare" different from "clean beauty"?

"Clean beauty" has no fixed definition. A clean-beauty brand can use synthetic emulsifiers, phenoxyethanol, "natural fragrance," fermented butyl-something, and a dozen plant extracts you'd never eat. The label is marketing. Edible-grade is a literal bar: every ingredient is food, period. The exceptions get named on the label.

What does "if you wouldn't eat it, don't wear it" actually mean — is this just a slogan?

It's the formulating rule. Every time we look at adding an ingredient, we ask: would I let my baby eat this? If yes, it's eligible. If no — we either find a food-grade alternative or, in the one case of zinc oxide for SPF, declare it openly. That's the whole product development philosophy.

Where can I see your full ingredient lists?

Every product page on this site lists every ingredient with no omissions. You can also see them all in the tables on this page. If you ever spot something you don't recognize, email us — Jeff (the founder) reads everything that comes in.

This page is a standard, not a medical claim. Eat My Face products are skincare, not treatments for skin conditions. If your skin has a specific medical issue, talk to a dermatologist.