A Brief History of Pine Tar

The use of pine tar as a skin conditioning and healing agent goes way back over a hundred years.  It's use likely coincided with the old practice of building large wooden ships.  Pine tar was exclusively used as a wood sealant and waterproofing agent.  Shipbuilders found that the pine tar helped heal their calloused and cracked skin, along with other skin ailments such as eczema and psoriasis.  Before long the shipbuilders wives started adding pine tar to their homemade soaps and salves.

An industry was born! Soon pine tar became more synonymous with good soap making.  However as with all high quality handmade goods it fell by the wayside when soapmaking became hugely commercialized.  Commercial soap companies found a way to remove the glycerin from soap to sell it to munitions and pharmaceutical companies for big profits.  In it's stead they used sodium laurel sulfate, a harsh chemical which is carcinogenic.  They also stopped using pine tar due to its big expense and in it's place used cortisone steroid type drugs.

We say no way to that junk.  Our Pine Tar soap is Authentic, which means we use 20% Pine Tar by volume of the soap base.  20% Pine Tar, 40% Coconut Oil, and 40% Extra Virgin Olive Oil.  A bar of our Pine Tar Soap may be more expensive than a bar of Dial, but it is really, really good.


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