Natural Cosmetics Workshop Imgages by TAU*MH are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Gasoline on our faces? Avoid skin dehydration without using chemicals!

In a consumer life nearly every product is a source of evil somewhere on the planet:

Depriving local population in central america from affording their staple foods, using lots of non recyclable packaging, polluting the environment, abusing human rights through its production or contributing to soil erosion, the list is never ending. But if there is one aspect on which we mostly all agree to be important to protect when we use a product, this is our own health.

In the field of cosmetics, we often hear contradictory messages about what’s good for us and what’s dangerous. For me, toxic substances in body lotions, sun screens and lip balms took a long time to unveil. Skin moisturising are marketed to be so essential for survival, how could they be harmful? Once we discover the tricks, a little bit of information and experimentation can help in deciding what really is important. In Kulturlabor Trial & Error we always try to promote workshops that let people learn by themselves, experiment and make their own opinions afterwards.

Our skin is an organ much like our intestines; it absorbs all kinds of substances and it stores them or transports them to our bloodstream. Said in a different way: if you wouln’t drink a glass of gasoline then you don’t want to rub it on your skin either. “Of course I would never rub gasoline on my skin!”

Taking a closer look at the label of conventionally produced body lotions, it turns out that several petroleum derivatives are their main ingredient. Why? For example, mineral oil, a very popular member of the petrol family, is a byproduct from the distillation of crude oil into gasoline. It’s a leftover and it’s really cheap: it’s probably more expensive to properly dispose mineral oil than to buy it and this is the reason why it’s used largely in the cosmetic industry. You can easily find it in Baby oils, Hand creams and Hair gels; inspect the labels for these terms, they are all different forms of the same substance: Paraffin, Petrolatum, Petroleum Jelly, Mineral oil.

Although mineral oil is used in moisturisers, it’s not a moisturiser in itself; it creates an oily layer on the skin that locks in moisture, hinders pore transpiration and prevents elimination of toxins through the skin. Not only is it not beneficial, it’s also considered to be carcinogenic by the World health Organisation.
An alternative to petroleum based oils are plant oils that do the same job as carriers and maintaining the consistency of moisturisers and additionally contribute to our skin health due to vitamin content and antibacterial properties.

Luna Leung, natural cosmetic specialist and Jorge Vilar, chemist, together with the Kulturlabor Trial & Error E.v. network offered a workshop to prepare lip balm and body butter from all natural and organic ingredients like Bees Wax, Olive, Castor, Coconut, Sesame and Almond oils as well as Cocoa butter and Shea butter. The procedure required only simple kitchen activities like melting and blending to prepare and all the participants brought to upcycled or reused jars of natural cosmetics.

You should try it out. Watch out for more workshops at and recipes contact Luna Cosmetics www.facebook.com/luna.natural.cosmetics.

Creaction - Exchanging creative solutions for social change


A fun team coordinated by the Kulturlabor Trial & Error, traveled the last 7th of February to the city of Avilés (Spain) with the goal of exchanging creativity ideas for social change with young people from Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Italy and from the local community in Asturias.

The exchange was hosted by the asturian association Ye Too Ponese. For 7 days we dived in the theory and culture of creative activism, we listed concerns and problems we would like to change and we put in practice some actions in the public space to create awareness about them.

We documented many of the actions and the results can be found soon in www.mastazine.net