We made face cream from beef fat for our four kids. Everyone told us we were crazy.

We're parents of four. When we actually read what goes into skincare - even the "natural" brands - we couldn't find a single thing we were happy to put on our children. Mostly water and glycerin, fragrance oils, cheap fillers dressed up as natural. So we went looking for what people used before any of that existed.

The answer was rendered beef fat. Tallow - used on human skin for over five thousand years. So we bought fresh suet from a local farmer, melted it down in a slow cooker in our kitchen, and made one small jar. Our family and friends loved it. That jar became the Original Tallow & Honey Balm.

When we started looking at other tallow balms, we assumed they all worked like ours. They don't. Most are made from commodity fat - bought pre-rendered in bulk, from no farm in particular, sometimes shipped halfway across the world before anyone opens the barrel.

That's why a lot of tallow products smell beefy and feel heavy. The fat is anonymous and the rendering is rushed.

And it's easy to tell: almost none of those brands will show you where their fat comes from. We decided that would be the whole point of ours.

Every week, local farmers deliver fresh suet to our facility in Enniscorthy - not frozen, not oxidised, never stored for months. We render it ourselves, slowly, with low heat and patience, the same way families here did for generations. It's hard, manual work. Honestly, no other brand is crazy enough to go through it.

This is the part that costs us more and takes us longer, and it's the part we'd never give up. Done right, the tallow comes out clean and odourless - and only then do we blend in the raw honey, olive oil and beeswax. It's the difference between something skin recognises and something that just sits on top.

We never planned a company. We made a jar for our own kids. But friends kept asking, then their friends asked, and two and a half years later it's a proper family business in Enniscorthy — with our four children still part of it, packing your orders and labelling the jars.

What hasn't changed is how it's made. Same suet, same slow render, same refusal to cut the corner that everyone else cuts. We've just gotten very good at doing it for hundreds of thousands of families instead of our own.

We can describe the process all day. What matters is what happens on real skin, weeks in. These are a few of the messages from our customers that make the early-morning rendering worth it: