3 Reasons Why I Threw Out Every Sunscreen In My House (And Replaced Them All With This)

What's in my old sunscreen ends up in my bloodstream. What's in HolyCow's Wildara Sunscreen doesn't.

This is the part that broke me.

In 2019, the FDA ran a study on chemical sunscreens. They had healthy adults put on a normal amount of sunscreen, four times a day, for four days. Then they measured the chemicals in the volunteers' blood.

The ingredients they tested? Oxybenzone, octinoxate, avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, and homosalate. Look at the back of your current sunscreen. I'd bet a coffee at least three of those are listed.

The FDA didn't ban them. They just said companies need to send in more safety data. Five years later, most companies still haven't. And these chemicals are still in nearly every drugstore sunscreen on the shelf.

"The same chemicals banned from coral reefs are sitting in your beach bag right now."

HolyCow's Wildara Sunscreen contains none of them. Zero. Instead, it uses non-nano zinc oxide, a natural mineral that sits on top of your skin like a tiny mirror, bouncing UV rays off before they ever reach you.

Nothing absorbs. Nothing leaches. Nothing ends up in your blood.

I'm not a chemist. I'm not a dermatologist. But I am a mom, and I'd rather use the sunscreen that doesn't show up on a blood test. See the HolyCow's Wildara Sunscreen 3-Pack offer →

Beef tallow doesn't just protect my skin. It feeds it.

Okay, I know. The first time I read "beef tallow sunscreen" I made a face. The same face you're probably making right now.

But here's the thing they don't teach in cosmetics class: tallow is one of the most skin-friendly fats on Earth. Its fatty acid profile is almost identical to your own skin's natural oils. That means your body recognizes it instantly, instead of treating it like a foreign chemical it needs to flush out.

While your regular sunscreen is busy drying out your skin and breaking down your collagen, tallow does the opposite. It loads your skin up with the four fat-soluble vitamins it actually craves:

Vitamin A. Helps your skin renew itself. The same stuff in expensive retinol creams, just in its natural form.

Vitamin D. Calms redness and inflammation. Most of us are deficient. Your skin can absorb it.

Vitamin E. A natural antioxidant. Fights sun damage from the inside.

Vitamin K. Supports healing and keeps your skin tone even.

Two weeks into using HolyCow's Wildara Sunscreen on my own face, I noticed my fine lines looked softer. The little dry patch under my right eye? Gone. The redness around my nose I'd been fighting with serums for three years? Calm.

"My old sunscreen blocked the sun and damaged my skin. HolyCow's Sunscreen protects from the sun and moisturizes it."

And no, it does not smell like a hamburger. Properly rendered grass-fed tallow has almost no scent. The lightweight formula spreads easily, sinks in fast, and leaves zero greasy film.

I trust the family who makes it more than the giant company that doesn't answer my emails.

Here's a fun experiment. Pick up your current sunscreen and try to find the founder's name.

You can't. There isn't one. The "brand" is a marketing division of a multinational corporation owned by another corporation. The product is made in a factory you'll never see, by employees who don't use it, sold to you by an agency that doesn't either.

HolyCow is the opposite.

It's a husband-and-wife team, Tristen and Collin Foote, who started rendering tallow in their kitchen in Indiana after they got fed up with hidden chemicals in every product on the shelf. They couldn't find a single clean sunscreen they trusted on themselves, let alone their family.

So they made their own. And then their friends asked for some. And then strangers on Instagram. And then it got too big for the kitchen.

Today, HolyCow's Wildara Sunscreen is still made in small batches. Still hand-checked. Still shipped from Indiana. The tallow comes from grass-fed family farms within driving distance. You can literally email Tristen with a question and she'll write you back.

Compare that to the 27 ingredients in my old bottle. I know what's in this tube. I know who made it. I know where the cows came from. That's not marketing, that's accountability.