Essential oils and herbs
Essential oils
Essential oils are chemicals produced by some families of plants that give them a characteristic aroma. Their role is to protect fruits, flowers or leaves and attract insects for pollination. The best extraction methods, that preserve all properties, are physical ones: water vapour distillation (as for lavender) or pressing the plant (as for tangerine peel). Essential oils are the pure essence of the plant. They are concentrated and powerful, so they are used in small proportions.
All essential oils in MATARRANIA Eco Cosmetics are pure, ecologically certified and extracted using physical methods instead of chemical ones.
Medicinal and aromatic herbs
Masía de Prades, the country house where we live and where we manufacture the cosmetics, is located in the middle of Ports de Tortosa-Beceite, a very well preserved mountain pass. Small villages of less than 1000 inhabitants are scattered all over its internal slope, where we are located. Since ancient times, they have made their living by traditional agriculture and stockbreeding and they have respected and preserved the territory's natural resources. This makes an ideal space to grow and collect wild herbs, which have never been polluted and keep a rich diversity. This is why traditional remedies elaborated with plants are so common. In many of our creams, herbs are macerated into the virgin oils (olive, almond and hazelnut) for 7, 14 or 40 days, in glass carboys protected from sunlight. Almost all of these plants are collected from the wild in our property, we only grow calendula and aloe vera, following ecological practices, the same we use in our orchard.
MATARRANIA Eco Cosmetics does not use plant extracts, processed in one way or another. Instead, we use the whole plant, as it allows all of its properties to be passed on to the virgin oil after maceration in cold conditions, a slower and more gentle procedure than hot maceration.