On July 17, employees and guests from One Paseo’s Shop Good in Carmel Valley went straight to the source, harvesting botanicals from an Encinitas farm to help create a healing, natural skincare product.
In partnership with Botnia Skincare, the group spent the morning in the field gathering roses, leaves of citronella geranium and lemon verbena at BeeWorthy Farms. The goal on a very sunny and warm summer day was to harvest 20 pounds of the plant material to be distilled in Botnia’s lab in Sausalito, creating a hydrosol spray that will be sold exclusively at Shop Good, the clean beauty and wellness boutique and spa.
Justine Kahn, the founder of Botnia, led the hands-on harvest with a group of Shop Good holistic estheticians and staff members, along with VIP customers who had experienced skin and health transformations.
Kahn and Shop Good’s founder Leah Kirpalani are longtime friends, having met 20 years ago in San Francisco when Kirpalani was deep in the thick of her health journey. At the time, Kirpalani was suffering from frustrating chronic health conditions such as hair loss, food allergies, cystic acne, fatigue, and digestive disorders. Kahn became her esthetician in 2009.
Cat Henning, owner of BeeWorthy Farms displays the perfect rose for harvesting. (Karen Billing)
Shop Good staff members harvested roses, lemon verbena, and citronella geraniums at BeeWorthy Farms. (Karen Billing)
Shop Good staff members harvested roses, lemon verbena, and citronella geraniums at BeeWorthy Farms. (Karen Billing)
Botnia founder Justin Kahn with Shop Good founder Leah Kirpalani. (Karen Billing)
Shop Good staff members harvested roses, lemon verbena, and citronella geraniums at BeeWorthy Farms. (Karen Billing)
Cat Henning, owner of BeeWorthy Farms in Encinitas. (Karen Billing)
Shop Good staff members harvested roses, lemon verbena, and citronella geraniums at BeeWorthy Farms. (Karen Billing)
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Cat Henning, owner of BeeWorthy Farms displays the perfect rose for harvesting. (Karen Billing)
“I would sit on her treatment table and cry my eyes out because I felt so lost, I felt like I couldn’t find any answers for what was going on with my health,” Kirpalani said. “The reason we’re all here today is because this woman instilled this idea that I turn my hardships into something that could help others.”
Both women cultivated their own businesses from their passions.
Kahn created her holistic Botnia skincare line that grew from humble roots to now partnering with over 200 spas nationwide, including locally at Shop Good, Cleo Skincare in La Jolla, and Flowers Wellness in Rancho Bernardo.
With encouragement from her friend, Kirpalani was inspired to transition from a career in fashion merchandising to become a certified holistic health coach, to start an online product shop and then take the leap to open her first brick-and-mortar Shop Good store in North Park in 2017. She added the spa to begin offering holistic facials and became one of the founding tenants of One Paseo in Carmel Valley when it opened in 2019.
“We just believed that we had something really special,” said Kirpalani, who has nurtured a tight-knit community centered around wellness and clean beauty.
“It’s such a sweet thing to have a dream and make that dream a reality,” Kahn remarked.
The July 17 harvest was just another way for Shop Good to encourage people to be involved in their own self care, to connect with nature and to have a hand in truly creating something from the ground up.
The group gathered at BeeWorthy Farms, another woman-owned business. Cat Henning has run the certified organic farm for the last five years, leasing one acre from the Encinitas Union School District, who operates the Farm Lab on the 10-acre property on Quail Gardens Drive.
A Chicago native, Henning came to San Diego to study environmental engineering at UC San Diego. While working for the state water board, she started milking goats: “Goats were my gateway into farming,” said Henning, who caught the farming bug, starting out with vegetables and then transitioning to beautiful blooms, grown both for people and for pollinators.
“So much land has been lost to development and there’s less and less space to grow, so that’s why urban farm spaces are so important to have and to protect,” she said.
BeeWorthy is primarily a cut flower farm, part of nine local farms in the San Diego Flower Collective that sell wholesale to flower shops —one of her biggest buyers is Native Poppy in Solana Beach. As part of her business is building community, she is able to host events and workshops at her workspace on the farm, a small rustic shipping container with picnic tables set up under sun shades.
In addition to flowers, Henning has plans to expand into medicinal and herbal products, recently purchasing her own small still, the same kind used by Kahn at Botnia. The artisan copper stills used to extract essential oils and hydrosols are handcrafted by Copper Pro in Ukraine, incorporating a unique heating element that can be plugged in rather than using an open flame.
At the farm Kahn described the skin-nourishing benefits of that day’s harvest of incredibly fragrant roses, citronella geranium leaves and lemon verbena, as well as the distillation process.
“Hydrosol is the plant’s immune system that’s been infused into an aqueous state,” Kahn said. “You skim off the essential oil, you separate it out and then you have this very safe diluted version of the plant compounds. There are still some amounts of volatile compounds, which is why hydrosols smell so dang good, but mostly what we’re extracting are the terpenes and flavonoids of the plant, its immune system.”
The hydrosol is meant to be sprayed generously on the skin, with the locally grown Encinitas plants working to help soothe irritation, reduce inflammation and boost moisture, the invigorating fragrance meant to be deeply inhaled. Kahn planned to start distilling the harvest that weekend in her lab, aiming to produce about 300 bottles, which should be ready for Shop Good stores by September.
That day’s harvest was very meaningful for Kirpalani, and special to be alongside her friend. Each of her Shop Good employees and customers had the unique opportunity to play a part in the Botnia bottles, carefully harvesting plants that were grown with love by BeeWorthy in order to help with someone else’s health.
Check out the botanical-based businesses at shop-good.co/, beeworthyfarms.com and botniaskincare.com