tried the french-fry-leftover tallow on my face last night before bed, and then again just now (a bit more this time than last night). there's a really noticable difference in both look and feel just a couple minutes afterwards, my face is insanely soft now etc. so it seems to work fine for your skin even when you've already been frying with it.

next i tried cleaning off the joints of my (collapsible) blind man's cane with it, you're supposed to use "normal hand lotion" but i don't own any so i put it off for months; the tallow worked great! in the process i realized "oh, that's right: you put GREASE on metal. tallow is GREASE. hand lotion is just FAKE GREASE." i've never had to grease anything before (though i know, in theory, you grease stuff like door hinges) so it was another eye-opener... looked it up and sure enough, tallow was one of the natural shoe polish methods prior to the 1900's as well...

then i was about to make my banana-chocolate stuff ("dry/painful eye medicine": coconut oil + cocoa powder + cloves + cinnamon mixed together and poured onto / mixed into frozen bananas) and realized, waiddaminute, normal chocolate has COCOA FAT in it! tallow is fat! LET'S TRY IT!!!

right now i'm trying a mix of cocoa oil + the french-fry tallow because the tallow has a kind of potato-y taste and i'm not sure how strong it'll be in the chocolate, but once i run out of this i'll try "pure" melted tallow and see how it goes. i get really excited when i think i've found something i can easily/cheaply do to make my diet / looks better...

also, i've known ever since i was a kid (since i read a lot of books) that people used to make candles out of tallow, but i didn't realize sterene candles are literally tallow-replacement candles. melted-then-cooled tallow is exactly the same colour and even a similar texture. beeswax candles are my fave (i can still remember the smell from using them as a kid) and i really hate sterene candles but this opened my eyes a little...