About Hearth and Homestead
Hearth and Homestead is a family-owned ancestral skincare company specializing in tallow-based skincare like balms, cold processed soap, facial care and body products. We craft our products by hand in Rustburg, Virginia, using clean, whole and organic ingredients. Everything we create is always free of toxins, fillers, preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial fragrances, GMOs, and other harmful substances — if it's not good enough for our family, it's not good enough for yours!
Our Story
Hi, I'm Lily Wilmoth. I started Hearth and Homestead in 2016 after the birth of my first child. Becoming a mother reshapes your priorities, and skincare was at the top of my list.
From Itchy Skin to Natural Solutions
Throughout my pregnancy, I had suffered from dry skin, rashes, and itching. This made me pay more attention to the ingredients in the skincare products I'd been buying from the store. I realized these body products were full of harmful toxins, chemicals, and preservatives. I knew I needed to find a natural skincare solution. I threw out all of my conventional lotions, body washes, and fragranced hand soaps, and started using straight cocoa butter on my skin and a plain, handmade soap for washing.
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Lily + Baby Josiah 2016
Learning from the Past
I read up about the sort of skincare our ancestors used. I knew that they used much less complex ingredient lists than our cosmetic labs do today, but I never realized the depth of nourishment that was possible using natural ingredients until I started doing some research. So many of the folk remedies of the past didn’t have any scientific data to back them up (now the research is coming out slowly!), and yet they have been remembered for thousands of years for a reason.
Handmaking Soap and Tallow Balms
I started making my own soap with homegrown garden herbs and simple, all-natural ingredients. I then started making baby soap, men’s soap, and even facial and exfoliating soaps. I committed to never use micas, artificial fragrances, or lab-made dyes and synthetic ingredients in my product line. It was a challenge to do things this way, but as a type-A mama bear, I am always up for a challenge! I knew if our ancestors were able to do this, I could too!
I branched out from soap to making body butter, eventually transitioning to tallow-based lotions and butters once I found a quality source of tallow, and made herbal balms, lip balms, soaks and scrubs and other body products. Our Herb-Infused Tallow Balm became our bestselling product in 2022, and still remains our all-time bestseller!
The Acne Struggle No One Talks About
As time went on, and as babies 2, 3, and 4 were born, our skincare routine as a family was so much cleaner, and Hearth and Homestead was a thriving little local business. But unfortunately for me I started to struggle intensely with adult-onset cystic acne. Even with transitioning to raw milk, local meat, home-grown eggs from our chickens, and cutting out seed oils, my face got worse and worse, and even using the natural soaps and products I was creating at home, I was still struggling with my skin. Painful cysts would pop up at all times of the month, leaving me self-conscious and feeling like I needed to cake on foundation to hide my flaws (which of course made the breakouts even worse).
At that time, I decided I needed to learn more about our ancestors’ approach to acne. I knew there had to be a cure, and my only way out was to crack the code on cystic acne.
Photos depicting my struggle with cystic acne and facial inflammation.
Rediscovering Ancient Wisdom
After studying a variety of sources, including this article from the Weston A Price Foundation on the powers of Vitamin A, I found myself diving into studies of ancient medical practices from China and Egypt, to Greece, to Medieval Italy. Across cultures I learned the deep power of a wide variety of whole ingredients including animal fats like tallow, schmaltz, and fish liver oils, fascinating plant ingredients like resins, ground quartz, ginger, pearl powder, and herbal infusions, and some less pleasant ingredients like macerated onion and whole egg mixed with vinegar. Of course we have all heard about the rather disconcerting use of lead in women’s makeup from ancient times, but we really are quite ignorant of the variety of very impressive ingredients they were using to care for their skin.
From Research to Results
Eventually, I zeroed in on fermented cod liver oil (FCLO)—a traditional remedy with modern science to back it. FCLO is rich in naturally occurring Vitamins A, D, E, and K, as well as omega fatty acids and protective fermentation byproducts that resist oxidation. Hippocrates praised the results of shark liver oil for treating a sebaceous cyst on one of his patients’ faces, so I figured I would start by using it straight on my acne and see if it made a difference.
I was the guinea pig, and started using it at night. The smell wasn’t great at all, but the results were undeniable. My face was definitely improving after a couple of weeks, and my skin was gaining a more even tone and glow (I would later learn that I was quite deficient in Retinol and Vitamin D, likely from my multiple pregnancies–so neat that FCLO is high in these vital nutrients).
To make cod liver oil more user-friendly, I began formulating: combining FCLO with our rich grass-fed tallow, a powerful herbal infusion, and high-performing oils like emu, elderberry, and açaí. I added essential oils historically known for facial care—geranium, chamomile, helichrysum, and blue tansy.
This was the birth of our 2 flagship facial products: Nectar Serum and Wild Bloom Bio-Active Tallow Balm.
As the longest-standing user of these products, I can confidently say they’ve transformed my skin. It’s balanced, glowing, and cyst-free. When the occasional breakout does happen, Nectar Serum is my go-to. I also believe these products help support graceful aging by deeply hydrating, nourishing skin cells, and offering protection against oxidative stress and environmental toxins. These products do so much more (and better) than any conventional or prescription product I have tried.
The Rebrand
I was so thrilled when I was finally able to launch these products for our customers.
Tallow was just starting to become popular at that time, so using cod liver oil in our products was not *too much* of an eyebrow-raiser. When I brought Nectar to the WAPF conference in Knoxville in 2022 I sold out, and people started leaving rave reviews!
We officially launched our Amazon storefront at the end of 2022 and worked hard to rebrand to a more professional look.
From Side Gig to Full-Time Mission
Up until 2022 Hearth and Homestead was a farmstand-type business. It was my hobby, my creative outlet, my farmers market side-gig. But after the birth of our fourth child that summer, I decided that either I would need to close up shop to focus more on homeschooling and being Mom, or we would need to actually make something out of this little hobby. My husband’s response to this dilemma was “Let’s go for it!” So, that fall we trepidatiously opened our Amazon Handmade storefront, got a marketing agent, and revamped our website and labels for a more professional look. We launched our flagship unscented tallow balm: Herb-Infused Whipped Tallow Balm–I had a hunch that tallow was about to take off in the mainstream. We prayed and trusted God with this step, and kept open hands, not knowing how it was going to do.
Unexpected Growth
By early 2023 we saw growth. Month over month our work load was bigger and bigger. By the end of the year we hired a team to be working with us in our basement creating and shipping products. Tallow was starting to make waves. Our tallow balm was enjoyed by all, and our 4.8 star rating on Amazon set us apart. In 2024 we experienced astronomical growth, thanks to the promotion of tallow in the mass media. We moved to a new house to accommodate our business in the basement. We had a bunch of people working in our basement and garage getting suet transformed into our tallow and creating and packing products to ship.
I had our fifth baby, Eleanor, in the middle of it all! It was so hard to keep up. In December 2024 Fox News interviewed me to talk about our tallow balm. In 2025, we moved everything into our huge, new production studio, where now we have much more room to create and build our business. And we are already almost outgrowing it. We have a team of about 25 people helping us run this production, and my husband and I still oversee all of the production day to day, and have a hand in everything from the rendering of suet to the approval of every tray of tallow before it gets piped into jars. Everything is still made by hand with the highest quality ingredients–actually much better quality than I was ever able to afford when I was just running a hobby business. We’ve built relationships with our suppliers and source the coolest and most unique ingredients, like our grass fed tallow, pastured sheep lanolin, dozens of organic herbs, oils, clays, spices, and aromatics from around the world. We have a team of well-trained artisans here everyday making this dream come true. And we are maintaining our amazing 4.8 star rating, something that makes me so proud of our team! It can be so tough to maintain consistency when growing in volume.
Our Mission Today & Where We Are Going
And so, that’s a little bit about Hearth and Homestead - how we started and why we care so deeply about every product we create. We blend ancestral wisdom with modern integrity to bring you skincare that truly supports and nourishes the skin—without compromise, and we will continue to do so! As we grow, we’re deeply grateful for every single customer—whether it’s your first time or you’ve been with us from the beginning. Our commitment remains the same: to pursue excellence, practice transparency, and care for your family the way we care for our own.
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Our Ingredients
We aren't shy about the fact that we're big proponents of regenerative agriculture, and the majority of our products start with our carefully selected, hand-rendered grass fed tallow that we handle from start to finish. Tallow was a very important ingredient to our forefathers!We are advocates of synthetic-free skincare, so we do not work with emulsifiers or preservatives, and instead choose to create anhydrous/oil-based products and products that are safe to use without any additives. This is how human skin was created to be nourished. If I wouldn't put it on my family’s skin, I won't put it in any of our skincare products.