The Oldest Face Cream Ever Opened

In 2017, archaeologists excavating a 2,700-year-old nobleman's tomb at the Liujiawa site in northern China opened a small, ornate bronze jar sealed for nearly three millennia. Inside: yellowish-white lumps that turned out to be face cream. Someone had packed this man with his beloved face cream for eternity.

Chemical analysis published in the peer-reviewed journal Archaeometry in 2021 confirmed the cream was made from ruminant adipose fat, most likely cattle, blended with moonmilk, a white mineral paste harvested from limestone caves. The researchers concluded it was almost certainly a skin-whitening cosmetic. The moonmilk did the whitening; the fat made it spreadable, kept it on the skin, and carried the mineral in.

Anyone who has read a modern ingredient label knows this logic. The researchers also noted that a contemporaneous Chinese manuscript, Fifty-Two Prescriptions, independently documented animal fat in skin preparations of the same era.

This is what peer-reviewed archaeology looks like when it corroborates what the ancestral health community has been saying for years: rendered animal fat was humanity's first serious skincare.

Egypt, Before That

The Liujiawa jar is the oldest confirmed cosmetic fat use in China, but the practice goes further back on other continents.

The Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, dating to around 1550 BCE, references animal fat as a base in healing ointments, combined with honey, herbs, and resins. Healers used it to seal wounds; noblewomen used versions of it for daily moisture and to help mineral pigments like malachite (the green eye paint you've seen in tomb paintings) adhere to the skin. The same fat that cooked the food, dressed the wound, and anchored the makeup.

By this point Egypt had one of the most sophisticated cosmetic cultures in the ancient world, with dedicated pigments, perfumes, and tools. Fat held its place in those formulations for a simple reason: it worked.

The Greek Word for It Is Still on Your Ingredient Label

The ancient Greeks had a word for hard animal fat: stear. You'll recognise the root — it became stearic acid, still listed on cosmetic labels today. Greek apothecaries chose rendered animal fat as the carrier base for medicinal herbs because it let the botanical actives penetrate and do their work.

Two cultures with no contact had arrived at the same conclusion: whatever you want the skin to take in, you put it in fat.

Rome Left Fingerprints in Theirs

In 2003, archaeologists excavating a Roman temple complex at Tabard Square in London lifted a small tin canister from a waterlogged ditch, sealed since the middle of the second century AD. Inside was a white cream so well preserved that the finger marks of the last person to use it were still visible on the underside of the lid.

Chemists at the University of Bristol analysed it and published the formulation in Nature in 2004: roughly 40 per cent animal fat, most likely from cattle or sheep, around 40 per cent starch, and tin oxide. The fat formed the base; the tin oxide turned the mixture opaque white, the pale complexion fashionable Roman women were after. The team went as far as recreating the cream from the same recipe and found it rubbed in with a smooth, powdery finish they compared to a modern foundation.

That makes three. China put mineral in fat. Greece put botanicals in fat. Rome put pigment in fat. Unconnected traditions, one formulation logic and two of them sealed the evidence in containers that survived long enough for modern chemists to open them.

The 11th-Century Physician Who Wrote Skincare Recipes for Home Kitchens

Here's where the apothecary-versus-household question gets genuinely interesting.

In the 11th century, a physician named Trotula de Ruggiero was teaching at the Schola Medica Salernitana in southern Italy, the most important medical school in Europe at the time. She wrote De Ornatu Mulierum ("On Women's Cosmetics"), a text that circulated across western Europe for three centuries and was eventually translated into most European languages.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology analysed the Latin manuscripts using modern pharmacological and pharmaceutical chemistry methods. The findings are specific: animal fats — hen, pork, goat, and deer — appear repeatedly as the primary lipid base across her facial skincare recipes. Recipes for cleansing, moisturising, lightening, and softening skin all centre animal fat as the medium through which botanical actives are delivered.

One recipe for refining the skin of the face calls for lily roots boiled in water with fresh pork fat in rose water. Another instructs boiling deer fat in water. There is method here, and a trained physician behind it.

And here's the detail that matters most: Trotula deliberately wrote these recipes for home use. The researchers note that she structured the text so the recipes could be easily reproduced at home, offering multiple versions of the same preparation calibrated to cost, ingredient availability, and technical difficulty. She also advised that fat-based ointments be applied at night and washed off in the morning, a routine anyone using an occlusive balm today will recognise.

Europe's leading medical school was putting this knowledge straight into women's kitchens, deliberately skipping the counter. That detail matters, because it means that for most of documented history, fat-based skincare lived in the home.

So Who Actually Made It?

The short answer: mostly people, at home, with fat they already had.

The longer answer: both channels existed simultaneously, serving different functions. Apothecaries (many of which originated in monasteries) supplied more complex medicated ointments for specific conditions — wounds, skin diseases, infections. By the 13th century, Parisian guild statutes required apothecaries to label their products with the month and year of preparation and to submit to regular inspections.

But everyday skincare — chapped skin, wind-burn, moisture, hair and scalp — was household work. Women rendered fat from animals they already had access to, infused it with available herbs, and applied it. Nobody at the time would have seen this as a cheap substitute for the real thing. It was the standard, codified by the era's leading medical voices and passed down through generations.

The frontier household in 18th-century America, the Plains tribes using buffalo tallow for wind and cold protection, the Aboriginal Australians using native animal fats as barrier protection — none of these had apothecaries. The knowledge was simply handed down, not peer reviewed. That part took another millennium.

What Changed

Tallow didn't stop working.

After WWII, the emphasis shifted decisively toward mass-producible, shelf-stable formulations. Petroleum-derived ingredients were cheaper and didn't go rancid. The fat-phobia of the 1980s and 90s finished the job, in food and in skincare simultaneously, and animal fats were repositioned as old-fashioned at best, harmful at worst.

There's an irony in how that trade has aged. Under the EU Cosmetics Regulation, petrolatum may only be used in cosmetics when its full refining history is known and it can be shown to be free of carcinogenic contaminants. The ingredient that replaced tallow now carries conditions of use that tallow never needed.

Meanwhile, tallow's composition hasn't changed. Its main fatty acids — stearic, palmitic, oleic, linoleic — are the same fatty acids found in the lipids of human skin, which is a large part of why it absorbs and behaves the way it does. The biochemistry Trotula was working with a thousand years ago is the biochemistry we're working with now.

Why This Matters to Us

At Fat of the Land, we work with tallow because the evidence for it runs deep: cross-cultural, documented, and older than almost any other ingredient still in use. From a Chinese nobleman's sealed bronze jar in 700 BCE, to a Roman woman's fingermarks in a London cream pot, to an 11th-century female physician's home skincare manual, to the kitchens and fields of people across every continent who rendered fat and used it on their skin as a matter of course.

Tradition alone proves nothing. What makes this record meaningful is its consistency: unconnected cultures across three millennia kept reaching for the same material, which suggests they were all responding to something real about how fat interacts with skin.

If this is the history of tallow, what we make is the continuation.

Sources: Han et al., "The rise of the cosmetic industry in ancient China," Archaeometry (2021); Pisanti et al., "The medieval skincare routine according to the formulations of Magistra Trotula," Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology (2023); Evershed et al., "Formulation of a Roman cosmetic," Nature 432 (2004); Ebers Papyrus, c. 1550 BCE, Leipzig University Library; Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products, Annex II.