Why I Went to Formulation School (And What It Taught Me About British Tallow)
This year, I completed my training as a Certified Skincare Formulator through Formula Botanica, the ODLQC-accredited organic skincare formulation programme. It's the kind of thing that sounds like a nice line for an About page. But it changed something more useful than my job title, it changed how I think about the tallow that goes into every Tarro product.
Why bother,when I already launched a skincare brand
I started Tarro on kitchen-table experimentation, reading and studying the course. That got the brand to where it is today, sitting on shelves in British farm shops and rural retailers, I wanted the chemistry underneath the story, not just the story.
Formula Botanica's programme is self-paced and thorough. It covers emulsion stability, preservative systems, INCI structure, and the kind of ingredient-level detail that turns "this feels nice" into "this is stable, safe, and does what the label says." For a brand built on pasture-fed tallow and plant oils, that detail matters more than most.
What it actually changed at Tarro
Tallow isn't a uniform ingredient. Its fatty acid profile, its saponification value, its texture on skin, all of it shifts depending on the animal, the breed, and crucially, what that animal ate. Grass-fed, pasture-raised tallow behaves differently on skin than tallow from grain-finished cattle. That's not a marketing claim, it's basic lipid chemistry, and it's exactly why Tarro works with named farms like Lannock Farm, Foxholes Farm and Old Hall Farm, rather than buying tallow from an anonymous supplier.
Understanding the science behind that difference gave me the language and the confidence to be precise about sourcing, rather than vague about it. It's also why you'll never see "chemical-free" or "clinically proven" on a Tarro label. Once you understand formulation properly, you understand why those phrases are meaningless, and why the honest, specific claim is always the stronger one.
What's next
I'm not stopping here. The next phase of learning feeds directly into upcoming Tarro projects, If you've ever wondered why Tarro talks about farms, breeds, and pasture systems as much as it talks about skincare, this is why. The science and the sourcing were never separate stories. They're the same one.
Julie Morrow is the founder of Tarro Skincare and a Certified Skincare Formulator (Formula Botanica, ODLQC-accredited).