Your skincare products are full of fats and oils. This startup launched a clean beauty line with ancient chemistry

Your beauty and skincare products are full of fats and oils. They’re what makes that cream so moisturizing or that emollient so good at repairing your skin barrier. 

Often, those lipids come from palm oil or even animal fats, both of which are environmentally damaging to produce. But soon, the lipids in your personal care products could come from upcycled carbon, skipping the agriculture industry entirely.

Savor, a tech company that makes fats and oils directly out of carbon, has already proven this technology through the launch of its butter, which began commercial production in 2025.

Now, Savor is announcing a personal care and beauty division, bringing its plant- and animal-free fats beyond food to what it calls a “new era” of clean beauty.

How Savor makes fats without plants or animals

Savor turns the typical production of fats on its head. The usual formula to create fat starts with energy (from the sun or even grow lights), which grows plants, which can then be turned into oils—or be fed to livestock, which produce milk that becomes butter or fat that goes into skincare, such as beef tallow.

Those processes require lots of land and have intense climate consequences. Both livestock farming and palm oil, which is used in a majority of beauty and personal care products, drive deforestation, leading to biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and more. 

Savor, however, skips all those agricultural steps. Instead, the company turns energy—like captured carbon dioxide, methane, or green hydrogen—directly into fats through a thermochemical process.

That carbon is combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and heat to create fatty acids, which can then be composed and rearranged into chains that mimic different fats, from butter to palm oil and cocoa butter. 

“Technically we’re making beautiful ingredients from thin air,” says Jennifer Halliday, an advisor across the biotechnology, beauty, and life sciences industries who is working with Savor.

It’s a replica of ancient chemistry. Billions of years ago, hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean created a chemical reaction that formed fatty acids out of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. 

Opportunities in the beauty industry

Savor’s butter has already been adopted by chefs and restaurants, including Michelin-starred SingleThread, in Healdsburg, California, and Jane the Bakery, in San Francisco. It launched commercially in March 2025.

Expanding from food to personal care makes sense for Savor, says Kathleen Alexander, cofounder and CEO of the startup, because the two industries overlap in terms of ingredients, environmental impact, and opportunity for change.

“Two of the main pillars associated with our platform are sustainability and versatility, or tunability,” she says. “Those wind up being very important in food, and they’re very important in the beauty space as well.”

By using its animal- and plant-free lipids, Savor says beauty companies could reduce their products’ emissions by more than 90%, compared to tropical oils like coconut or palm. 

“Palm and tropical oils wind up showing up a lot in the beauty sector, and those are products that we can really only grow in some of the most rich and biodiverse areas of the world.” Alexander adds. 

The agricultural industry at large takes up half of the world’s habitable land, and produces 25% to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

Savor skirts this entirely; the company says it requires 800 times less land to make its fats and oils than the agricultural industry.

Currently, Savor has a 25,000-square-foot pilot facility outside of Chicago, with plans for a large-scale commercial plant by 2029.

The startup, founded in 2022, has raised $33 million, according to PitchBook. Its Series A, funded in 2024, was led by food tech VC firm Synthesis Capital and Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy.

Vegan tallow and more

To launch its beauty and personal care division, Savor created three unique products. First, a Vegan Tallow, a colorless and odorless alternative to beef tallow, which has become a recent skin care craze. 

“We first made that for food customers, and we absolutely still have food customers that are interested in that,” Alexander says. “But the market pull in food for vegan tallow, it turns out, is a little bit lower than the pull we’re seeing in beauty and cosmetics.”

Savor also created what it calls Climate Conscious Triglycerides, a palm-free emollient; and Mimetic, made to mimic the skin barrier’s structure to nourish and repair it.

Don’t expect to see Savor-branded beauty products on store shelves, though. The startup created these three products to show what is possible, but ultimately, it’s a B2B company that will give its ingredients to brand formulations. 

Savor says it’s actively engaged with beauty brands, ingredient distributors, and personal care formulators to bring these materials to market, but can’t yet share names.

And there’s lots of room for interest to grow, it adds, as brands adapt to regulatory pressure around their supply chains.

Traditional feedstocks from plants and animals are also subject to increasing volatility, because of climate change’s effects on crops, geopolitics, traceability concerns, and general price swings. 

“We’ve actually just had a change in the GHG Protocol Standard to require corporations to start including land use in their accounting, which is just huge,” Alexander says as an example. “That is one of the biggest advantages from an environmental perspective of our platform, that we require less land to make our fats and oils.”

Humans have always had an inherently extractive relationship with the planet, she adds. It’s how our food chain works; it’s how we make all sorts of products.

“What we’re doing at Savor is rethinking, what if humans could make molecules ourselves?” she says. “What would it mean to really exist on this planet in a way where we can actually not necessarily have to have to make use of other creatures in order to nourish ourselves.”