How to Use Pine Needles for a Winter Perfect Body Oil

3 min readFeb 8

Body lotions are great and easy to use until they are not. More and more people have become intolerant to the glycerine in lotions (what makes it white, creamy and instantly easy to apply). Glycerine clogs spores and can give you rashes or eczema in the long run. That’s one of the reasons why I started looking into body oil.

You can find some great retailed organic body oils for reasonable prices or easily make your own. This way, you know exactly what ingredients you are rubbing into your skin daily, and it is much cheaper.

I won’t go into the details of creating a body oil from scratch today as I want to focus on my experience using infused tree needles in body oil to help your skin fight off the winter weather.

Different conifers and needles

There are essentially three kinds of conifers you can use in Northern America. We also have yew available, but it is highly toxic.

We are left with pine, fir and spruce trees.

Pine has long needles all rooted together at the branch.

While fir and spruce branches can look alike, spruce needles are square (both start with an “s”), while fir needles are flat (both start with a… you get it). Spruce needles also feel between feel round and roll between your fingers.

They are easy to recognize. If you want to avoid making any mistakes, keep to pine trees as they stand out. This way, you won’t infuse a toxic variety into your body oil.

While each brings slightly different properties, they all have antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties. They all smell great. However, this will vary on the environment and soil where the tree grew, as well as the environment the needles will be in when drying.

When you go for a walk in the woods, you must be careful to choose branches from trees that are far from polluting sources. Don’t take too much. Half a grocery bag is enough to infuse 1 litter of oil! Use sharp scissors to avoid arming the tree unnecessarily.