From Tinder Date to Tallow

Melissa grew up in the Illawarra surrounded by hunters. Her dad hunted. Her brothers hunted. They'd come home with goats, rabbits, the occasional deer, the odd pig — and Melissa would give them a hard time about it. She ate meat, she wasn't going to pretend otherwise, but she was happy to let that little contradiction sit in the corner and be ignored.

"I didn't think I had the heart or the stomach for it," she says now, laughing at herself with the ease of someone who has well and truly proven herself wrong. "Plus they're all laughing at me because I'm a hypocrite. I'd give them a hard time — you call yourselves animal lovers — but I understand now."

So what changed?

Kristian — hunter, software developer, man with a very substantial beard — showed up to their second date with a jar of tallow he'd made himself. Rendered from the fat of a wild deer he'd taken, boiled into stock, the fat skimmed off the top. He was proud of it. Melissa thought it was a bit smelly.

Then she put it on her face.

"I felt like my face was so soft — I've never felt it that soft. I even messaged him, I said, I hope my face doesn't droop. Like seriously it's too soft."

She pauses. "I did panic for a couple of minutes."

But in that moment, something clicked. Here was this man giving away a product that did things nothing she'd tried before had done — and she'd never heard of it. Wild deer tallow. In Australia. She looked it up. She started reading. She found out why it works: the fat profile of deer tallow is remarkably similar to the sebum our own skin produces, which means vitamins A, D, E and K, omegas, and fatty acids absorb deep and fast. Not sitting on top of the skin. Actually in it.

"I just kind of spat it out of my mouth — let's make a business out of it." Kristian said yeah, alright. And that was that.

Here's the thing about building a skincare business from wild deer tallow: eventually you start to feel a bit strange about the fact that you won't go near the source of your income.

"I started feeling a bit guilty. Here I am making money off the deer and I can't even be there."

That guilt did what logic and persuasion couldn't. It got Melissa into the bush.

The first few times were about watching, learning, staying out of the way. She discovered she was naturally patient in the field — hyper-aware, quiet, tuned in — which surprised no one more than herself. "Kristian said he'd never seen me that patient and aware of my surroundings. Any of the qualities I've lacked my whole life all of a sudden just turned up in the hunting room."

She saw her first deer — a stag on a hill at night — on what she thinks was the third or fourth outing. They stalked him. She got shaky. He took off before a shot was taken. She was hooked anyway.

That want for the stag kind of outweighed it by this time. It was a slow process — but once it was there, it was there.

— Melissa Volkanovski

It took six outings before Melissa took her first deer. A Rusa stag. On her forty-third birthday, with her daughter by her side.

"I think God was giving it to me," she says, dead serious.

Kristian had taught her well: aim behind the shoulder, through the lungs, make it fast, make it clean. Melissa went a touch forward and caught the top of the lungs and the heart. The deer went down quickly. Kristian was mildly annoyed — he likes to eat the heart.

And then she cried. Not from guilt, not from shock — or not only from those things. From seeing the other two stags that had been with him, now standing in the paddock, down one. "There was once three and now there's two," she says. "I don't know. I cried. But not in the way — like I could quite quickly move on. It was sad. But it was pretty cool at the same time."

That duality is something hunters know well. The way a harvest can be both hard and right. She landed on it the same way most of us do — by thinking about what comes next. The butchering. The meat that would feed her kids and her dad and Kristian's friends. The fat going into the skincare. The skull now sitting on her shelf.

"We use everything. That beautiful thing. And we're not supporting — you know — the mass slaughterhouses and things like that. That people like me used to just turn a blind eye to."

Melissa is quick to describe herself as a total beginner. One deer. One fox. A rabbit she missed entirely the other day. She's not performing modesty — she just doesn't see the point in overstating where she is.

But she's building. Kristian is still correcting her when she gets distracted mid-stalk. She's still learning to keep pace, stay quiet, read the land. The difference from that first outing to now is that she's starting to wander off on her own a bit. She's earned that trust, even if she wouldn't put it that way.

She prefers night hunting. The dark suits her — quieter, fewer people, less glare. She'll hike for kilometres in the dark for a deer when she won't walk around the block in the daylight. "Put a deer in front of me and we're going hunting — I can go around the whole thing ten times."

She uses a 6.5 Creedmoor. Same as our host, as it turns out.

Five months of formulating. The challenge wasn't the tallow itself — wild deer tallow is genuinely extraordinary, leaps ahead of grass-fed beef tallow in its fatty acid profile and skin compatibility. The challenge was texture. In its raw rendered form, it's waxy, heavy. Melissa needed it to perform the way it had on her face that first night without leaving people walking around looking like they'd been greased.

She went deep into natural oils. Experimented. Failed. Reformulated. Eventually landed on a full range covering sensitive, dry, oily, and acne-prone skin — plus a mature skin formula with actives (stronger oils that deliver a more visible result in a shorter timeframe). The marrow goes in too. Rendered separately, added to specific formulations. Nothing is wasted.

It's very holistic. I don't know how to explain it. It just feels right — the way it should be, I guess. We use every part.

— Melissa Volkanovski

The beard range came from Kristian complaining. Everything he'd tried made his beard feel worse. Melissa made him a deer tallow beard balm. He went outside while she was still shopping at Officeworks, and she came out to find him in the carpark, standing there with a big cheesy grin, just stroking his beard. "My beard is so soft."

The range now includes beard health balm, beard sculpt, daily face balm, night face balm, dry skin balm, dry itch spot balm (good for dry patches on bald heads, apparently), and a bug balm — all natural, no toxins, built for people who want to go clean without sacrificing results. They're shipping their first orders on the day we recorded this episode.

Melissa spent most of her adult life without a hobby. Shopping, going out — the standard things. Nothing that really lit her up. She describes herself as someone who used to care too much what people thought, who never had a passion for something, who was burning out in a support worker job she dreaded going to every day.

Hunting changed that. Not overnight, not dramatically — but steadily. She started caring less about who had an opinion on her choices. She started feeling whole in a way she struggles to put words around. "I feel like I'm where I was always meant to be," she says, and then immediately worries that sounds stupid. It doesn't.

She's now planning to get her firearms licence of her own. She wants, one day, to go on a hunt with a whole group of women. She's already earmarked a Sambar hunt for the coming week — not as a spectator. As the shooter.

"You've got to let me have that one. He can get it next time."

We couldn't agree more.

Melissa — thank you for being on the show, for being so honest about where you started and how far you've come, and for proving that it's never too late to find the thing that makes you feel like yourself. The Women Who Hunt family is lucky to have you. 🦌