Ashtray Brand Maria Beata Reimages Iconic Masterpieces with Cigarette Butts

Maria Beata is an innovative portable ashtray brand. A local company that has a great ambition as its purpose: eliminate the ocean’s greatest source of pollution. To help them face this challenge, Lola-Normajean, a Portuguese creative agency, created ‘The Cigarette Butt Museum’, a sarcastic way of recognising the ‘creative geniuses’ who throw the butts away in the most unusual places.

The idea consists in finding cigarette butts that look like famous masterpieces or monuments, identifying them with provocative signs and cleaning them out, as soon as they become a part of a virtual gallery in the brand’s Instagram account.

A cigarette butt pressed over a shell in the beach becomes ‘The Birth of Stupidity’, in association to Botticelli’s masterpiece ‘The Birth of Venus’. Butts disposed in a circle are named after ‘Stonehenge’, and when put over dog faeces they become an art piece called ‘Self-Portrait’.

“The Cigarette Butt Museum is a collection created to disappear. With this campaign, we turn each person into an ‘art curator’ that also is part of a task force aiming to solve a global environmental issue”, says Leandro Alvarez, Lola-Normajean’s chief creative officer.

More than generating awareness about the ocean's greatest source of pollution, the campaign stimulates people to find, photograph, share, and clean out all of those disgusting masterpieces. “Everyone is invited to become a Curator of The Cigarette Butt Museum”, says Maria Beata, who also points out a simple solution to this huge environmental issue: discarding the cigarette butts in their portable ashtrays.

You can check out all the masterpieces at the brand’s Instagram profile @mariabeata.pt.