Open a container of pine tar in a warm workshop and the first thing that hits you isn't crisp pine needles or essential oil. It's a dense, heavy wave of woodsmoke, burnt resin, damp earth, and a sharp, almost medicinal undertone.
It smells like a campfire that was put out three hours ago by a sudden summer downpour on a pine forest floor.
The flames are gone. The ground is wet. Smoke still hangs in the wood.
That smell has followed pine tar through forests, over the decks of wooden ships, and into household medicine cupboards. It belongs to the way the material is made, and it survives into the products made with it. Before we get to the soap, there is quite a bit of history in the container.
In this article
- Meet the ingredient
- How pine tar is made
- A Scandinavian working material
- Boats, rope, and naval stores
- The Appalachian medicine cupboard
- The grade matters
- Pine tar, coal tar, and T/Gel
- Back at the workbench
Meet the ingredient
Pine tar is a complex mixture produced by heating pine wood with restricted oxygen. Its appearance depends on the wood and how it has been processed. In a deep container it can look dark brown to almost black. Draw a thin smear across glass or pale timber and the color opens up into translucent brown, amber, and mahogany.
Its texture matches its smell. Thick and tacky, it clings to a spoon and draws out slowly. Cold makes it stubborn; warmth makes it flow. A thin film and a full container can look like two different materials, though the only difference is how much light gets through.
The pine tar I use is a traditionally kiln-produced grade, made in batches and prized by soapmakers and formulators making products for the body. It's expensive, golden brown, rich in resin, and low in pitch, with a history of pharmaceutical use in soaps, shampoos, and ointments. Its production gives it the character I'm after: deep campfire smoke, warm resin, and that unmistakable earthy edge.
Color and pour tell you something about it. To understand the rest, you have to follow it back into the wood.
How pine tar is made
A pine tree supplies the raw material. Heat makes the tar.
Sap carries water and nutrients through a living tree. Resin is the sticky secretion familiar to anyone who has handled a damaged pine branch. Neither is pine tar. Making tar requires a transformation.
Resin-rich roots, stumps, and fatwood have traditionally supplied the feedstock. The wood is heated with restricted access to oxygen, a process called pyrolysis, or destructive distillation. Heat breaks the material down, producing tar and other substances that can be collected. Charcoal remains behind.
Traditional Scandinavian kilns were built with that collection in mind. Prepared wood was stacked over a sloping, funnel-like base, covered with earth or turf, and heated under controlled conditions. The covering restricted air, and the slope gave the tar a route to an outlet.
Every stage called for judgment: selecting resinous wood, arranging the charge, managing the heat, recovering the liquid. Let the wood burn away and there is less left to collect. Build a poor collection system and the product stays in the ground.
That process helps explain the smell. The pine has passed through heat and come out as a different material, carrying smoke and resin together.
A Scandinavian working material
In the Nordic countries, pine tar became part of the care of exposed timber. Roofs, fences, buildings, and boats all needed protection from weather, and the surrounding forests supplied the material. Archaeological research documents Scandinavian tar production during the Iron Age and its expansion alongside Viking Age maritime activity.
Norway's stave churches give that history a visible scale. Heddal Stave Church dates to the thirteenth century, and its caretakers still describe regular tarring of the exterior, with the material heated and worked into the wood. That treatment is one part of the continuing maintenance that has kept the building standing through centuries of weather.
For fences and other exposed timber, a familiar mixture combines pine tar, linseed oil, and gum turpentine, often in equal parts. A related Swedish treatment is known as Roslag mahogany, a name that makes sense once the wood takes on that deep, warm brown.
The turpentine thins the mixture so it spreads and soaks in. Linseed oil contributes a drying oil. Pine tar brings its resinous character, color, and protection.
The appeal continues long after the first application. When the surface weathers, a maintenance coat restores its richness and renews the treatment. You keep working with the same finish instead of stripping it back before anything useful can happen. A sound fence, built and maintained properly, can serve generations.
That's a quality I appreciate as a woodworker. A finish needs to perform when it first goes on, but it also needs a sensible answer for the person who comes along years later with a brush.
On a fence, that person can admire the result from dry ground. Aboard a wooden ship, the demands were less forgiving.
Boats, rope, and naval stores
A sailing vessel carried an enormous amount of wood and natural fiber into an environment determined to wear both out.
Pine tar became part of maintaining that material. It was applied to cordage and used with oakum, the fibrous material worked into seams during traditional caulking. It also served as a protective coating for timber. Tar and pitch had related jobs, with the precise material and method depending on the work.
Multiply those needs across a fleet and a forest product becomes a strategic commodity.
Tar, pitch, rosin, and turpentine made up the trade called naval stores. Scandinavian supplies helped maintain European shipping; American pine forests later supported a substantial industry, particularly in the Carolinas. The demand connected people working among the trees inland with ships far beyond sight of land.
Theodore Kaye's account of pine tar describes its use at Mystic Seaport on cordage, oakum, and timber coatings. That brings the story close to home in New England, where preserving wooden vessels has also meant preserving knowledge of the materials used to maintain them.
The smoky smell on warm timber and tarred rope is part of that working history. It was already familiar in shipyards when pine tar found another place in people's lives: the household remedy.
The Appalachian medicine cupboard
Pine tar's topical history stretches back well before modern soapmaking. A dermatology review traces medicinal use to antiquity and describes its later appearance in preparations for itchy, flaky, and inflamed skin. Its authors worked for a manufacturer of pine-tar products, which is relevant context for their assessment of the evidence.
In Appalachia, that history comes into focus through the Foxfire project. Around 1970, Joseph and Terry Dickerson were photographed making tar from pine knots at Foxfire's headquarters in Mountain City, Rabun County, Georgia. The archival record states that the tar was used as medicine.
It's a small scene with a long history behind it: resinous wood, heat, a collected material, and knowledge passed between people who knew what to do with it. The photograph records a practice still being demonstrated within living memory.
Across centuries, pine tar moved through household preparations, commercial soaps, and pharmaceutical formulations. Those uses weren't identical, and how long people repeated them doesn't settle whether they worked. But they explain why the ingredient stayed familiar after wooden ships ceased to dominate the coast.
Its place in the medicine cupboard also makes the next distinction important. A traditional material can have several uses without every batch being equally suited to each one.
The grade matters
The kiln-produced grade I use has a documented history in pharmaceutical preparations, and it also has uses in wood preservation. That overlap is part of the ingredient's story.
What makes a material appropriate for a formulation is its specification, composition, and intended application. A grade number or a familiar smell can't supply that on its own.
I select creosote-free pine tar for Beardsman™ products. The term needs a little explanation because "creosote" has been applied to different mixtures. Wood creosote and coal-tar creosote have different origins and compositions, and shouldn't be treated as one substance.
A creosote-free declaration is also distinct from a claim of zero polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. Some PAHs are carcinogenic. Their presence and concentration are questions about the actual material, and they need evidence, not assumptions based on its botanical origin.
The practical consequence is straightforward: sourcing a raw ingredient means looking beyond its name. For a product that goes on the body, the documentation matters as much as anything a formulator can see, smell, and feel.
There's another source of confusion, and many people will recognize it from a bottle that once stood in their shower.
Pine tar, coal tar, and T/Gel
Original Neutrogena T/Gel Therapeutic Shampoo listed 0.5% coal tar as its active ingredient. It's a familiar reference for the word "tar" in a personal-care product, but it was not pine tar.
Coal tar comes from processing coal into coke. Pine tar comes from heating wood. Their histories overlap in topical preparations, but their chemical compositions differ.
Coal tar also carries established cancer hazards associated with occupational exposure. The National Cancer Institute identifies increased cancer risk among people exposed through their work.
That evidence needs to be read alongside the evidence for medicinal use. The American Academy of Dermatology says studies have not shown increased cancer risk in people using coal tar to treat psoriasis or eczema. A medicated shampoo and prolonged industrial exposure are different circumstances.
Pine-tar preparations are another branch of the history of topical tars. But a particular pine-tar soap can't be assumed to do the same job as a medicated shampoo. The finished formulation determines what evidence and claims belong to it.
With that distinction made, we can return to pine tar on its own terms: a material chosen for a particular formula, with properties worth knowing.
Back at the workbench
In soapmaking, those properties become immediate.
Pine tar is difficult to work with. It brings soap to trace so quickly that I have to go old school: hand mixing and very small batches.
Trace is the point at which the soap batter has emulsified and begins to leave a visible trail across its surface. With pine tar, the working time can vanish fast. I need to get the ingredients mixed and the soap into the mold while it will still move. A stick blender would make an already short window shorter.
Small batches give me something I can manage by hand. The ingredient sets the pace, and the process has to accommodate it.
A liquid wash is a different formulation task. The pine tar still has to be distributed and stay suitable in the finished base, with color, consistency, and scent balanced against the rest of the recipe.
I use pine tar in our Pine Tar Soap and Pine Tar Beard Wash. The wash is an olive-oil liquid soap. The bar is a separate formulation. A shared ingredient connects them, but the complete recipes determine how each behaves in use.
For more on the wash itself, Beard Wash vs. Shampoo explains the cleansing base in more detail. For bar storage and everyday use, see How Long Does a Bar of Soap Actually Last? The Ingredients Glossary covers the other materials in our formulations.
What draws me to pine tar begins before the finished product. There's something satisfying about working with a material whose character is so closely tied to its making. The resinous wood, the kiln, and the heat remain recognizable in what comes out.
Open the container and that rain-soaked campfire is still there.
By then it has been on a church roof, down a ship's seam, and through a household medicine cupboard. On my workbench, it becomes part of another batch of soap. A different use, with the same smoke in the wood.