How to Make Pine Salve (and Why You’d Want To)

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Pine salve goes by various names – pine resin salve, pine pitch salve, pine gum salve, and pine drawing salve. They’re all the same thing – a herbal skin healing salve made from the sticky resin from pine trees and some species of spruce and fir. 

This potent pine resin salve is easy to make, even for novice home herbalists, it whips up pretty fast, and it’s a great addition to your herbal first aid kit and emergency supplies. Use our tried and tested pine salve recipe to make your own, and use this guide to find out more about this powerful herbal ally.

What is Pine Resin?

Pine resin (not pine sap) is the thick white-to-cream sticky substance that pines, spruces, and firs secrete when they get damaged. It’s basically a stress response. 

The resin (or pitch) protects the damaged site, preventing fluid loss, insect infestation, and fungal or bacterial infection. It essentially flushes and seals the tree’s wound, creating a barrier against further damage. 

Pitch Salve Benefits

Pine salve has been used for thousands of years because it’s antiseptic, astringent, and antibacterial. It also works as a drawing salve, helping to draw out deep-seated splinters and impurities and pus from boils, abscesses, and wounds. 

Interestingly, herbalist Kiva Rose says that the oleoresin from pine acts as a counter-irritant, stimulating circulation, inflammation, and the local immune response to quicken the body’s healing process. 

And, because it’s antifungal and antibacterial and acts as a barrier, it helps to prevent infection from setting in, making pine resin salve a great choice for applying to minor wounds, scrapes, and grazes. 

While the pine pitch itself is a counter-irritant, blended with the right kind of oil in a salve recipe like this one, the action is gentle, and the additional oil helps to nourish and soothe the skin. 

Pine salve is also an excellent natural alternative to Vicks Vaporub. It’s essentially a natural chest rub. The volatile terpenes in the pine pitch salve act like a respiratory decongestant when rubbed on the chest, and with no potentially harmful petroleum-based products. Win-win!

This multi-purpose herbal salve also has a warming action that’s great for easing discomfort from sore muscles and painful joints. Just rub the salve in where the pain is, and let it get to work. Because it’s also stimulating, it helps to increase blood flow to the affected area, easing pain and aiding healing. Another option for aching joints and muscle pain is our dandelion salve recipe.

How to Use Pine Salve

Apply a thin layer of pine salve to cuts, abrasions, and minor wounds. Leave a thin layer to act as a barrier and aid healing.

For splinters or, in an emergency situation where you have a boil or abscess and can’t get immediate medical attention, you can apply a poultice of pine salve to the affected area to draw out the impurities.

For splinters, apply a generous helping of pine salve and cover with a clean bandage. Leave overnight to draw out a splinter. 

And now for something pretty cool: You can use pine salve as a firestarter. If you’re camping and struggling to get a fire started, dab a fairly generous portion of pine salve onto a cotton ball and you’ve got an instant fire starter. 

The pitch in the salve is highly flammable, so it’s a great emergency fire starter. 

Tips for How to Make Pine Pitch Salve

Sourcing Pine Resin to Make Salve

The white pine tree is super common in much of the US and is a solid choice for making pine salve. But you can also use many other pine trees, including red pine, pitch, jack, ponderosa, spruce, and fir. 

You’ll still get the same benefits, but you’ll find that each pine resin has a different scent, some more pine-like and others earthier or muskier. 

A note of caution: Make sure you know what you’re harvesting! Some evergreens are poisonous – particularly yew trees. 

Harvesting Pine (Oleo)Resin

Technically, because it also contains oil, pine pitch is an oleoresin. Hence its propensity for staying fairly soft. However, for ease and clarity, in this recipe, I’m just going to keep calling it resin. Also note that you are not harvesting pine sap, you’re harvesting pine resin for your salve making. 

When it comes to harvesting pine pitch, there is one absolute golden rule: Do not take it all! 

It does not belong to you, it belongs to the pine tree, and it’s there for a purpose – to protect and help to heal the tree. 

So, please, please, please respect the wonder of nature and take less than a third of the resin you find on any one tree. 

If you look around, you’ll likely find lots of trees with resin on them, so there’s no need to over-harvest from any single tree. Leave each tree with enough resin to still have a thick layer over the wound. 

Remember, you want these trees to be around for years to come so you and your children can harvest their resin for this salve, their needles to make pine needle tea, and other elements of these trees to make pine remedies, foodstuffs, and more. So don’t put them at risk by overzealous resin harvesting.

Pine resin is sticky. It clings to everything it touches, so I keep a wide-mouth jar and a butter knife specifically for harvesting pine resin and nothing else. 

I also strongly advise you wear old tatty work clothes that you don’t mind getting messy. 

If possible, look for a tree where the pine resin has dripped down well below the wound. Here you can harvest all the excess resin that isn’t directly covering the wound without worrying about harming the tree. 

In summer, the resin is softer and fairly easy to slice off without hurting the bark beneath. In colder weather, the resin hardens up quite a bit, but if you wiggle the knife beneath a patch of resin, you can usually pop off a fairly good chunk. 

How to Remove Sticky Pine Resin from … Everything!

Remember I told you pine resin was sticky?! Well, it is. It gets everywhere and sticks to everything, because that’s its job, right? To form a protective barrier that prevents bacteria, fungal spores, and insects getting through. And it’d be pretty useless if it just washed away at the first sign of rain. 

As an oleoresin, pine resin is not water-soluble, so trying to wash it off – even just off your hands – isn’t very effective. But because it’s an oleoresin, it’s oil-soluble. So, to get pine pitch off your hands (and knife), use a small splodge of vegetable oil or olive oil. 

Yes, I know oil is messy, but it breaks down the pine resin. Give your hands a good “wash” in oil, then wash them properly with hot water and soap. 

The same premise works to get pine pitch out of your clothes and off your shoes. Rub the area with vegetable or olive oil (or whatever other food-grade liquid oil you have to hand) until you feel the resin break down. Then apply some liquid soap or dish detergent to the area. And, for clothes, pop them in the washing machine and run a normal cycle.

Now, if you don’t have a good stain remover to get the oil spots out of your clothes, skip the oil. Instead, use alcohol. Pour some high-proof alcohol over the resin and scrub at it until you feel it dissolve. Then apply dish soap, then place in the washing machine and run on a normal cycle.

How to Store Pine Resin Salve

I like to use glass jar or metal salve containers like these ones. They keep your salve away from direct sunlight, which is good because too much UV exposure can reduce the potency of the salve. 

You don’t need to worry about keeping the salve in the fridge – just keep it away from too much heat to avoid melting it. And, because you’re dealing with pine pitch, which is extremely flammable, keep the salve away from direct flames.

Tweaking the Pine Salve Recipe for Extra Herbal Power

Now, pine salve is potent and very useful on its own, but pine resin plays nicely with other herbs, so you can boost its power or broaden its usefulness by adding other ingredients or by using herb-infused oil as the base rather than just plain oil. 

You can also play with different oils. Olive oil is a good all-round salve base. But you could also try something extra nourishing for the skin like almond, jojoba, or coconut oil. 

However, note that with coconut oil, because it’s solid at room temperature, the salve can be a little bit thicker, so you may want to reduce the beeswax just a touch.

Pine Pitch Salve Recipe