Yeah it’s a bar soap, commonly used for both skin and hair.

Aleppo Soap

If you like the weird scent of coal tar—I’m not judging, I do too—you might also like pine tar soap. Pine tar serves much the same function in soaps as coal tar, so that’s a bonus as well.

It’s clearly a scent derived from pines, not coal, but it appeals to my nose in much the same way. They’re both in the same family of weirdness.

Aleppo soap finally resolved it for me after years of fighting the yo-yo effects of medicated shampoos. It’s just an old hard Castile soap made using olive and laurel tree oils. Laurel tee oil is apparently pretty good for skin, and works fine to clean your hair.

I don’t go in for woo, but it is kinda fun to be using a soap recipe that goes back a couple thousand years. Mileage may vary of course, but I’ve found it to work extremely well, and as a bonus has a pleasantly neutral smell—herbal as you might expect. 20% or so blends of laurel tree oil seem to do the trick.

Looks like we’re in for a science fiction double feature!