Hydrate, Soothe, and
Protect Your Skin,
Naturally
Let Dr. Keenan Botanical Solutions feed your skin with organic, plant-based products that bring moisture, support its healing, and protect the skin from the environments around us.
Formulated on the
Olympic Peninsula
from Pacific NW Organic and Wildcrafted Ingredients
Skincare with a Sense of Place
There’s a misunderstanding about life here on the North Olympic Peninsula. It goes something like this: With all the rain and fog and atmospheric moisture there’s no way one’s skin could get dry. We wish!
As outdoor-centered people, our skin barely has a chance. All of our outdoor activities--gardening, backpacking, 4-wheeling, wildlife-sighting, kayaking, hunting, surfing, biking, you name it--expose our skin to drying elements.
But staying cozy at home doesn't necessarily protect skin: Wood-fired stoves make the best heat, but the drying impact is real. Those who like to cook or bake know how drying our obsessions can be.
What’s more, anyone who’s worked in a climate-controlled office knows that the air, whether it’s heated, cooled, or just circulated is notoriously drying.
Frequent hand-washing typically leaves hands dry and unprotected from the elements. And climate changes bring ever more environmental challenges to our skin.
Of course, we don’t hold the market on wind, sunlight, salty air, campfires, and other skin challenges. Dry skin is universal.
Keeping skin hydrated and feeding the skin's microbiome play a powerful role in not just preventing dryness and irritation ( though, that alone would be enough, right? ), but also in strengthening skin's ability to heal wounds, fight inflammation, and assist our larger immune system in keeping us healthy.
Dr. Keenan is all about creating powerful, practical products to assist the skin in doing what it does best.
Products
Soothe • Hydrate • Protect
From head to toe
WinterCitrus
Healing Herbs
Rosemary Mint
Coconut Orange
Pure Unscented
Lip balm is the go-to remedy for lip care, and Dr. Keenan has created a line of organic, botanical lip balms that soothe, soften, heal, and protect lips. Our lip balms are enhanced with organic essential oil blends that improve the soothing, regenerative power of the balms.
Lip Balm
With no oil glands of their own, lips are defenseless against the ravages of harsh weather, dry environments (from office buildings to windy beaches), aging, and, well, kissing! People on the Olympic Peninsula tend to lead outdoor-centered lifestyles, but nearly everything we all do for recreation or work or love puts our indispensable lips at risk of drying, chapping, cracking, and peeling.
Our botanical lip balms feature deeply hydrating hemp seed oil that soothes and gets right to work decreasing redness and inflammation. Rich in fatty acids, hemp seed oil goes on to help lips retain moisture and strengthens the skin barrier.
The addition of coconut oil further hydrates and protects by building that protective barrier so important for lips. This lush multi-tasking oil also aids in healing red and cracked skin while offering modest anti-microbial protection for cracks and cuts and wind rash. (Smells amazing, too, right?!)
The tiniest bit of beeswax solidifies and holds these two powerhouse oils together in the tube, but its work does not end there. Rich in Vitamin A it helps in cell regeneration for chapped lips and luscious beeswax lays down a breathable barrier to protect lips from the environment.
Lip balm, when made well, is a multi-skilled superhero, providing relief, healing, and protection for the most ravaged lips. Your lips will love Dr. Keenan’s lip balms.
Body Lotion
Mint
Sandalwood
Escalante Wind
Coconut Orange
Renaissance Blend
Deep Forest Campfire
With the synergy between organic sunflower oil and fresh distilled water playing strong lead roles, you're in good hands. As a seed oil, sunflower oil is the least allergenic of all plant-based oils. Friend to all. In a perfect trifecta for skin, sunflower oil hydrates, attracts moisture and prevents skin from drying.
Sunflower oil is rich in anti-oxidants, so it prevents inflammation and its co-occurring redness. Those anti-oxidants also protect the skin from sun damage and other environmental risks to the skin.
Similarly, high in vitamin E, sunflower oil helps the skin regenerate healthy cells. And as an added benefit, vitamin E, a natural preservative, helps extend the lotion's freshness while it nourishes the skin.
Sunflower oil won’t clog pores (non-comedogenic) and is recommended for all skin types: oily, normal, dry, and even acne-prone skin.
Now, whether it has something to do with the unabashedly sunny flower the seeds grow up in, or the chemical alchemy of the oil—like an abundance of omega 3 fatty acids and anti-oxidants—sunflower oil has an uplifting effect on the spirits. Overachiever.
Other Ingredients:
Distilled Water
Our immensely hydrating lotion gets some of its power from pure, distilled water. There’s nothing like water for hydrating our skin. When combined with oil, its ability to hydrate the skin is strengthened.
Organic, Plant-Derived Stearic Acid
Itself a fatty acid found in our skin and in plants, stearic acid is an emollient, helping to keep the skin soft. In lotion, it also emulsifies, or blends, the oil and the water together to make lotion that spreads smoothly on the skin. So smooth.
Organic, Plant-Derived Emulsifying Wax
Emulsifying wax found in plants stabilizes the lotion as well so the hydrating water and nourishing, protective sunflower oil come together into a rich lotion that spreads evenly on the skin.
Organic Essential Oils
Each of the organic essential oils that we use have their own palette of plant-power properties. And, of course, the aromas. Ahhhhhhhh...
Preservatives
ECOCERT and COSMOS-approved, gluconolactone provides sustained antimicrobial activity against bacteria, yeast, and mold eliminating any need for harsh synthetic additives like parabens or formaldehyde releasers. It also provides additional skin hydration benefits, making it well-suited for even the most sensitive skin. Also ECOCERT and COSMOS-approved, sodium benzoate is an organic acid preservative that gets a boost from the gluconolactone in such a way that its preservative power is released continuously over time. This synergistic pair keep your lotions safe and stable. Additional organic Vitamin E (tocopherols) help keep rancidity at bay so your lotion remains fresh.
Foot Powder
Dr. Keenan’s Foot Powder is packed with moisture wicking ingredients like cosmetic clay and corn starch. (NO talcum powder!!). These gently drying powders absorb sweat, keeping added moisture away from skin. Then, to deliver the two-pronged preventive punch to the funk, three of nature’s strongest fungicides, spearmint, sage, and cloves make feet, socks, and shoes very unfriendly places for funky fungus.
The aroma is amazing! This is what shoes should smell like! Gym bags, suitcases, and closets too.
It only takes a bit. Sprinkle in shoes, or socks, or right on feet (and give ‘em a good rub while you’re at it). Let the drying aspects do their work while the antifungals get to work curbing the fungus that leads to athletes foot, toe fungus, and most prevalent problem of all, world-round: funky, stinky shoes.
Also, friends, funky foot problems can be improved with the following as well:
• Live in sandals when you can. We prefer Birks on the Peninsula. And wool socks—which breath beautifully btw—make this possible year round. (Hahaha-no accounting for fashion)
• Change your socks daily.
• Wear shower sandals in gyms and campground showers.
• You love hiking, but best not to wear your boots, or any airtight shoes, all the time. Drying air flow is our friend in these parts.
Meet Dr. Keenan
Lynn Keenan has been making organic body products for her family and friends for more than 35 years.
Becoming a clinical massage therapist after wrapping up a career as a social work professor brought a new focus to the craft. It expanded her knowledge and understanding of the science behind effective daily skin care and the reach of her products grew to massage clients, and beyond. More recently she completed a certification program in natural and organic skincare formulation through Formula Botanica, London's award-winning, on-line teaching institution for organic formulation and indie beauty entrepreneurship.
A message from Lynn Keenan:
Thank you so much for your interest in Botanical Solutions! I’m excited about introducing you to our products and sharing the vision for Doctor Keenan’s Botanical Solutions. My own skin care journey, and so much more, inform and inspire my formulations. I have a hunch you’ll see some of your own experiences and skincare needs here. It’s my hope that you’ll also find some excellent resources and delights for your skin.
Let’s start WAY back in the early 1960’s when my young, Rustbelt-fleeing parents wanted nothing more than to take their two fair-skinned, red-haired kids to the beaches of their new southern California home. In those pre-SPF years we paid dearly for the hours in the sun with painful sunburns and peeling-skin summers, year after year. Those years were followed by years romping in the sun-drenched Colorado Rockies. Even with the welcome introduction of sunscreen, by the time I was 35 I was seeing dermatologists every 6 months for services that most people don’t receive until well into their 60’s, if at all. Alas, Irish American white girls just can’t handle our sun! In-between dermatology visits I sought out organic, plant-based skin products—which were significantly harder to find in the 80’s than they are today—then eventually began making my own rudimentary clean oils and balms to keep my already-damaged skin hydrated and soothed.
So, my own needs, and desire, for effective, sensorial, and pleasurable skin care drove my early and nearly lifelong dabbling in formulation. But as I see it, that alone is not all that has shaped my current approach to skin care development. I want to tell you a bit more of my story in hopes that you’ll see some shared values and come to understand how skin care and our approaches to it can and often do reflect some larger values and priorities.
People ask me if I’m a real doctor. And yes, yes I am! I have a doctorate in Social Welfare from the University of Washington, where, among other valuable things, I learned a generative approach to understanding social problems and discovering the best solutions to addressing them. When I left the social work profession, that approach to becoming deeply curious about problems and their solutions went on to characterize my clinical massage therapy practice, and my work today in natural, plant-based skin care formulation.
But creating skin care products that become part of people’s daily lives and self-care clearly involve more than solution-based thinking. There’s art in skin care because the products we use can be nourishing to the skin as well as sensorial and lovely, evocative as well as effective, solutions as well as self-care. Skin care at its best takes place at the crossroads of science and art; it’s no mistake that “care” is in its very name. I am drawn to this whole-person creative endeavor and love working at these crossroads.
I want to share with you just one more trail, if you will, in the journey that is Dr Keenan Botanical Solutions. This is an important and energizing aspect to me as I know it is for many. When I became a clinical massage therapist I founded a wellness center that over the years grew an in-house tea bar into a small bistro. As my colleagues and I planned this growth many of us were incorporating our lives with practices of “eating local”, of adopting a “100 mile diet” (strengthening community sustainability by sourcing the food we eat from a 100 mile radius surrounding our community). When we began to ask “could we make our bistro a 100-mile restaurant?” I was cautiously jazzed by the possibilities! We did, indeed, grow into a 100-mile restaurant, sourcing the vast majority of our menu items from the 100-mile radius around our place perched on the bluffs of Port Angeles, Washington. The land and its produce and products shaped our menu, and as a result, our restaurant strengthened the health of our local food systems and the economic well-being of our communities, in our own modest way.
When I retired, and enrolled in skincare formulation training through Formula Botanica, early on we were encouraged to explore our regional area for botanical ingredients grown and/or produced locally. (With an international student body, the discoveries were amazing!) That process inspired me. I was awed, once again, by the bounty of the place I live. That same question rushed in, immediately: could Dr Keenan Botanical Solutions become a 100-mile skin care company? Or, more realistically given its specificity, a 500-mile skin care company? Could I use the same sustainability approach to skincare by sourcing not just one, but a critical mass of ingredients locally or regionally? It's been a guiding principle ever since.
It would come to drive many aspects of my formulations. I’ve come to appreciate the reflective nature of that: the formulations are a reflection of the Pacific Northwest, itself a hydrating, skin-friendly home for a skincare company, and its sun-parched founder.
Doctor Keenan Botantical Solutions products are available exclusively at these locations:
Carlsborg Store