The Man Who Built Nopsor in His Garage — And Changed Thousands of Lives

José Luis Aguilar Sánchez and Guadalupe Tapia — founder of Nopsor and the woman who believed in him first. Querétaro, Mexico.

My father, José Luis Aguilar Sánchez, is 85 years old. He still oversees the Nopsor formula from Querétaro, Mexico — the same formula he created more than 25 years ago in a garage, with no funding, no laboratory, and no guarantee that any of it would work. What he had was a chemistry background, a lifelong engineer's instinct for solving problems, and a level of personal desperation that cleared away any hesitation about trying.

This is his story. It's also the story of Nopsor — why it exists, what's inside it, and why a formula created in a Mexican garage has helped thousands of people manage a condition that medicine has never fully solved.

It Began With Something That Looked Like Dandruff

In his early thirties, José Luis noticed flaking on his scalp. It seemed minor — the kind of thing you address with a different shampoo. But it didn't respond to any shampoo. It spread. It thickened. It became something no one around him could identify, including the doctors he consulted.

Barbers refused to cut his hair, fearing the condition was contagious. He was turned away from shops. The social isolation that followed a psoriasis diagnosis in Mexico in the 1960s and 70s was not softened by public awareness campaigns or online communities. There was shame, silence, and very little accurate information.

Over the following decades, the psoriasis progressed. By the time José Luis reached his late fifties, lesions covered nearly 90% of his body. He had spent years and considerable money on every treatment available: corticosteroids, coal tar preparations of the era, light therapy, dietary protocols, traditional remedies passed along by well-meaning neighbors. Some worked briefly. None held.

Most people would have stopped there. José Luis heard something different in those words — not a closed door, but an open problem. He was an engineer. Open problems were his professional language. If the available treatments weren't working, the question was whether a better combination existed.

The Garage in Querétaro

What followed wasn't a moment of inspiration. It was methodical work — the same way José Luis had approached engineering problems throughout his career. He went back through every treatment he had tried, documenting what had produced short-term improvement and what had caused harm. He read whatever he could find on the mechanisms behind each active ingredient. He looked at the herbs used in traditional Mexican medicine for skin conditions, researching whether any had documented anti-inflammatory or antiseptic properties.

Two pharmaceutical ingredients kept appearing at the center of his analysis: coal tar and salicylic acid. Coal tar had been used in dermatology for over a century — it slows the abnormal skin cell cycle and reduces inflammation. Salicylic acid breaks down the scale buildup that blocks other treatments from reaching the skin. Neither was new. What was missing, in his estimation, was a formulation that combined them effectively with a delivery vehicle that allowed sustained overnight contact — and a botanical layer that addressed inflammation and skin repair at the same time.

He selected eight medicinal herbs based on their individual properties, most with roots in traditional Mexican botanical medicine. He blended them into a petrolatum-based pomade — thick enough to stay on the skin through the night, delivering coal tar and the herb extracts while the body was in its natural repair cycle.

His wife, Guadalupe Tapia, was there from the first application. She was the first person who believed the formula was working — and the person who encouraged him to share it beyond their household when the results became undeniable. Within months of consistent use, his psoriasis had cleared by nearly 70%. After decades of progression, the lesions were receding.

The Eight Herbs

The botanical blend in the Nopsor Pomade is one of the things that separates it from standard coal tar formulations. Each herb was selected deliberately, not decoratively.

The pomade delivers these herbs alongside coal tar in a petrolatum base that keeps everything in contact with the skin for hours. The shampoo — developed as a complementary Step 1 — uses salicylic acid to clear the scale barrier first, so the pomade's active ingredients can penetrate rather than sit on top of uncleared plaque.

From a Garage to Thousands of Patients

Why This Story Matters to Every Nopsor Customer

Most skincare products are created by committees, developed in corporate laboratories, and optimized for shelf life and margin. Nopsor was created by a patient — someone who had exhausted every conventional option and decided that if the answer existed, he was going to find it himself.

That origin matters in a concrete way: every ingredient in the formula was evaluated first on José Luis himself. The coal tar concentration, the herb selection, the petrolatum base, the two-step sequence — all of it was refined over months and years of self-experimentation on a person who had no other options and nothing to lose by being honest about what worked and what didn't.

The formula hasn't changed in 25 years. Not because no one has tried to improve it, but because the results it produces have remained consistent across thousands of patients — and because José Luis, at 85, still believes in it the same way he did when Guadalupe watched his skin clear for the first time in their home in Querétaro.

The US chapter of this story started not with a business plan, but with family. My wife Orfelinda saw people in the Spanish-speaking community who knew Nopsor from Mexico, who needed it, and who had no reliable way to get it in the United States. She made it available. For years, before any of the expansion we're building now, she kept the formula accessible to the people who were asking for it — quietly, without fanfare, driven by the same instinct that started everything in that garage in 1999: someone needs this, so let's make sure they can get it.

My own story with psoriasis started in 2008. Rashes and itching that I couldn't explain, that dermatologists in Florida couldn't diagnose correctly for years. By 2012 it had become palmoplantar psoriasis — thick, cracked plaques on my hands and feet that made everyday tasks painful. I went through cortisone, steroids, phototherapy. Nothing held. I had quietly accepted that this was simply my life now.

It took a phototherapy technician — not a doctor — to ask the obvious question: had I ever tried my father's formula? I hadn't. The answer to an eight-year problem had been in my own family the entire time. I started using the Nopsor system in 2015 and went into remission in 2016.

I spent the next ten years at HP thinking about what that meant. My father had built something that worked — genuinely worked, on his own body and on mine — and most of the people in the United States who could benefit from it had never heard of it. When I retired from HP in 2024, the decision about what to do next was simple.

What we're building now is the chapter that brings this formula to the English-speaking American market — through Amazon, through Shopify, eventually through dermatologist partnerships and the National Psoriasis Foundation. New packaging designed for patients who are seeing Nopsor for the first time. New channels. New reach. The same formula José Luis made in his garage in 1999, still overseen by him at 85 from Querétaro.

That's the story. That's why Nopsor exists. And that's why we offer a 40-day guarantee — because confidence in the formula is built into 25 years of history, not just marketing.