How to Get Tar Off Shoes?

Getting Tar Off Shoes

It’s the rainy season once again and your beloved shoes are almost in danger of getting stained and stuck with tar. Be prepared by knowing how to get tar off shoes.

Removing tar from the soles of shoes can be challenging. It is made especially hard by deep imprints and creases or carved designs where tar could get stuck.

There are two methods you can use to get tar off your shoes. One is with the use of brushes and chemicals to scrub off tar from the soles of your shoes. Second is to use oils to remove tar from the top of the side parts of your shoes.

Bottom of the Shoe

So what’s tar, anyway? Substances and materials can come in contact with your shoes that are hard to remove or clean. Tar is a sticky, petroleum-based material used in road construction that usually gets into shoes. Most of the time, tar gets stuck on the shoe sole and is usually dense and clumped.

Here are different ways on how to get different types of tar off of your shoes.

Black tar

This black substance is used to fix tiny cracks and is very thick, sticky, and has a foul smell. To remove it, simply use a solid plastic scrape, or a blunt knife and be ready to wipe with a towel.

After you have scraped off the chunky clumps, you can use a car tar remover spray to remove the small and thin bits of tar left.

Beach tar

Surprisingly and questionably, why would you have beach tar on your shoes? Aren’t you supposed to be barefoot on the beach? Regardless of how you got beach tar on your shoes, the fastest way to remove it is to put your shoes in a bag then in a freezer.

Freezing your shoe with beach tar will freeze the water content of that tar and will make the tar brittle and easy to chip off.

Pine tar

Pine trees have natural resin that protects itself from infestations and cracks. This natural resin will not come off as easily as it does not respond well to most chemical removers.

Although it looks a bit better than most dark colored tar as pine tar has light color, you would need a specific pine resin remover for cars, leave it for 5 to 10 minutes, and then just wipe everything off.

Bar tar

If you ever find yourself stuck with gunk that is a mixture of sweet drinks and chewing gum from a night at a bar it might be disgusting to scrape it off of your shoe. However, help comes from unexpected corners! As well as fixing squeaky hinges, WD40 has many other uses. A great solution is to use WD40 several times on the tar until it comes off.