This drawing salve recipe will give you a powerful natural remedy for your home first aid kit.
Drawing salve recipe
Nobody likes to get things like splinters, wasp stings, or infected wounds! These things can be a little more intimidating to treat than surface wounds. Deeper injuries need different care compared to shallow ones.
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Drawing what?
If you’re new to the idea of a drawing slave, let’s talk for a second about what they are and how they work. Unlike healing salves, drawing salves use certain ingredients to draw toxins, infections, and foreign substances up and out of a wound. They are a wonderful traditional remedy and have been used for many years.
What is drawing salve used for?
I also have a post where I show how to make an herb-infused tallow salve. That one is a great herbal healing salve for shallow wounds, like cuts, scrapes, scratches, and bruising. It’s not so ideal though for wounds that have dirt or deep splinters or infections in them. In those cases, the fast healing action from the herbs can actually seal over the top layer of skin on a wound, keeping the dirt, splinter, or infection lurking under the surface.
Deeper wounds that involve dirt, splinters, infections, or even stings, respond really well to a drawing salve. The powerful drawing action pulls the dirt and infection up to the surface. That way, the wound can be clean and healed properly.
Drawing salve is perfect for those pesky splinters that hide out under the skin, out of the reach of tweezers. It will pull the splinter up to the surface so that it can be removed.
This is a great thing to keep on hand for bee and wasp stings, too. The ingredients in black salve draw the venom up and out of stings so that relief and healing can occur.
People have even successfully used drawing salve to treat boils and other skin infections. It draws the infection up to the surface so that it can heal.
Why tallow?
You can definitely make a drawing salve recipe with other fats and oils. A common base is a combination of olive oil and beeswax. While this can still work very well, I always like to make the very best version possible of anything I’m creating.
You probably already know how much I love grass-fed tallow. It has phenomenal skin benefits! As I was designing this drawing salve recipe, I knew I wanted to incorporate tallow. I love how instead of just acting as a base to hold the active ingredients, grass-fed tallow has its own antibacterial and skin-healing properties. Tallow is incredible for rapidly healing skin, because it contains so many vital nutrients that skin needs.
What other ingredients are used?
The two main drawing ingredients in this salve are activated charcoal and bentonite clay. Activated charcoal is well known for its effectiveness in pulling out and absorbing toxins and poisons. Bentonite clay is powerful at both cleansing and drawing out infections and toxins.
I like to add some tea tree and lavender essential oils as well. These help with infection-fighting and wound healing.
How to use it
My favorite way to use a drawing salve is to first clean the wound the best I can with soap and warm water. Then I gently dry the wound, and apply a generous, thick layer of drawing salve. After that, I cover the wound with a bandage and let the salve do its work. Right before bed is a great time to put the black salve on a wound. I like to make sure that the wound is bandaged well because the salve can definitely stain clothing.
After the salve has been on the wound for several hours or more (overnight is great!) I remove the bandage and carefully clean away the salve. At this point, I like to examine the wound to see how it’s doing.
I clean away anything that the salve has drawn out. If it looks like another application would be good to complete healing, I put more salve and a clean bandage on, and let it sit some more. Once the wound looks nice and clean, and there isn’t any sign of remaining infection, I expose it to the air and let it finish healing. The rest of the healing usually happens very quickly at this point.
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Drawing salve recipe directions
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup grass-fed tallow balm
- 2 tsp beeswax
- 1 tbsp bentonite clay
- 1 tbsp activated charcoal
- 6 drops tea tree essential oil
- 6 drops lavender essential oil
Instructions:
- Melt tallow balm over gentle heat until it is liquid.
- Pour the needed amount of tallow balm into a quart mason jar.
- Add the beeswax to the tallow balm.
- Create a double boiler by placing the mason jar on a cloth inside a saucepan with water.
- Heat the water until it comes to a low simmer.
- Once the beeswax is melted, stir to combine well.
- Add bentonite clay and activated charcoal to liquid tallow balm and stir to incorporate well.
- Remove from heat and add essential oils. Stir to combine.
- Pour hot mixture into tins or jars to store.
- Allow tins to sit until the salve is solid.
- Put lids on containers and store them in a cool, dark place.
Drawing salve recipe video
More things you can make with grass-fed tallow
How to Render Tallow with the Easy Crockpot Method
Tallow Lip Balm Recipe with Honey
What are your favorite home remedies?
Do you have a natural first aid kit? What do you have in it? Share in the comments!
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Drawing Salve
This black drawing salve recipe will give you a powerful natural remedy for your home first aid kit.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup grass fed tallow balm
- 2 tsp beeswax
- 1 tbsp bentonite clay
- 1 tbsp activated charcoal
- 6 drops tea tree essential oil
- 6 drops lavender essential oil
Instructions
- Melt tallow balm over a gentle heat until it is liquid.
- Pour needed amount of tallow balm into a quart mason jar.
- Add the beeswax to the tallow balm.
- Create a double boiler by placing the mason jar on a cloth inside a saucepan with water.
- Heat the water until it comes to a low simmer.
- Once beeswax is melted, stir to combine well.
- Add bentonite clay and activated charcoal to liquid tallow balm and stir to incorporate well.
- Remove from heat and add essential oils. Stir to combine.
- Pour hot mixture into tins or jars to store.
- Allow tins to sit until salve is solid.
- Put lids on containers and store in a cool, dark place.
