There I stood in front of my bathroom mirror,
and saw a version of myself that looked noticeably younger.
Beyza, my cousin, stood behind me.
She looked at me.
Then she looked more closely.
“Ece…”, she said slowly.
“What happened to your skin?”
I laughed nervously.
“You’re imagining it.”
She shook her head.
“No. Something is different. You look fresher. Calmer.”
In that moment, I knew:
This was no longer just my impression.
Still, I remained skeptical.
Too skeptical to leave it at that.
So I continued to test. Systematically.
Not out of curiosity – but out of distrust.
I changed details.
The texture.
The processing.
The origin.
Some versions felt good –
but changed nothing.
Others felt heavy on the skin.
Or just made it shiny.
Until I ended up right back where
I had already felt it.
“This here,” I said to Beyza,
“is different.”
She furrowed her brow.
“Then try it on me.”
Beyza had had this one deep line between her eyebrows for years.
A wrinkle that stays – no matter what you do.
I applied the cream.
We sat at the kitchen table.
Talked about trivial things.
After a while, she stood up.
“Wait,” she said
and went to the bathroom.
Then all I heard was:
“Ece… come here.”
She stood in front of the mirror,
slowly running her finger over her forehead.
“The wrinkle feels soft. Not so… firm anymore,” she said.
The next morning, she wrote to me:
“My skin feels completely calm.”
Two days later:
“My colleague asked if I had been on vacation.”
A week later:
“I need more of this!!”
Then her sister came.
Then a friend.
Then the friend of the friend.
Each time, the same reaction:
“My skin feels more stable.”
“I suddenly need less skincare.”
“Somehow my face looks more relaxed.”
I mixed new batches every free minute.
Evenings. Nights. Weekends.
Until Beyza eventually said:
“Ece… this is too big for your kitchen.”
She was right.
If this was going to work,
it had to work always.
I spoke with 16 manufacturers. With laboratories. With producers.
Many waved it off.
“Too pure.”
“Too minimalistic.”
“Something like this cannot be produced stably.”
Finally, I ended up at a small specialized laboratory in Southern Germany.
No high gloss. No marketing.
Just people who have been building formulations for decades.
The lead chemist listened to my story.
Flipped through my notes.
Smelled the sample.
Then he just said:
“Let me have that.”
He took my handmade mixture,
checked consistency, melting behavior, stability.
A few minutes passed.
Then he looked at me.
“This is interesting,” he said.
“Very pure. Very consistent.”
I held my breath.
He nodded slowly.
“This is no coincidence. The fat structure is clean. The base makes sense.”
Then came the sentence I had hoped for:
“Yes. We can reproduce this. In larger quantities.
Without compromise.”
Three months later, I held the first professionally manufactured batch in my hands.
I opened the jar.
The texture? Exactly like my version.
The skin feel? Identical.
The effect? Precisely what I knew.
Only one thing was new:
Now it was stable.
Reliable.
Ready for more than a kitchen.
The first units went to the women
who had been there from the beginning.
My “kitchen testers.”
The messages came quickly.
“Feels exactly the same.”
“My skin immediately calms down again.”
“Just like before – only more consistent.”
One of them simply wrote to me:
“Please don’t change anything about it.”
In that moment, I knew:
This is no longer an experiment.
Tallow Naturals was born.