Mama Bear said:
My soaps are all vegan.. so take it all with a big grain of salt. ;-)
Which means, plants were killed for it... ;-)
BTW, although in soapers and shavers colloquial tallow is usually used to denote bovine rendered suet (beef fat), technically, tallow is animal fat. Practically, it is used for fat from cows, sheep, and deer, but there is no reason why someone may not use it to denote pork fat.
In food, there are more 'specific' terms, like lard and dripping.
Not even the iNCI list defines tallow unambiguously as bovine fat. The INCI list (as included in the EU cosmetics directive) defines the ingredient ADEPS BOVIS as: tallow. An animal fat. Contains primarily glycerides of C16- 18 fatty acids; and ADEPS SUILLUS as: Lard. The purified internal fat of the hog. It consists primarily of stearin, palmitin and olein.
So lard is not tallow (in cosmetics ingredients that is) and is derived from pork (which the SUILLUS implies of course), and tallow is supposed to come from cows (hence the BOVIS), but the definition does NOT explicitly state this...
So what do we know, as far as interpretation of ingredients lists goes: If there is pig fat in a product, that should be clear from the label. Lard glycerides are also mentioned in the INCI list, but NOT fatty acid salts from lard oils. I don't know whether that means that lard is not used to make soaps (it clearly IS used for other purposes in cosmetics) or that lard soaps are listed under other entries...
So even the INCI list does not explicitly define what is meant by tallowate on a label. We probably need to ask a few commercial oil (triglyceride) chemists what the industry's policy is on this...
FDA and EU regulations are not entirely clear either, but wordings appear to exclude pig fat from the definition of tallow.
Henk