Down a charming lane in Grass Valley, behind a well-kept Victorian, sits a tiny workshop--blue with white trim. There, Frontier Angel’s Diane Longacre makes her soap.
A few years ago, Diane Longacre moved to Grass Valley with her husband and young son. Diane had made soap on a part time basis when they lived in the Bay Area. Since the move to Nevada County, Diane has grown the business into a full time job. “I’m a down home person,” Diane says. Making soap grew naturally out of a practice of making everything she could from scratch, including her own bread.
Diane makes two kinds of soap: one with shea butter and one with goat’s milk. Each type of soap also uses several kinds of oils and butters as well as Diane’s proprietary blend of essential oils. These soaps are available at a handful of local stores, in one store back East, and directly from Frontier Angel. Diane says more stores want to carry her soap, but she’s selective about what vendors she’ll work with.
She’s just as selective about what she puts in her soaps. In her shea butter soap, she uses only unrefined fair trade shea butter. Only local goat milk (currently from a farm in Rough and Ready) goes into her goat milk soap. Her soap is minimally packaged in a hemp and recycled paper sleeve. And, although the proportions of her essential oil blends are a secret, Diane believes in full disclosure. Every ingredient of her soap is listed on the label.
One of the ingredients listed is sodium hydroxide. Sodium hydroxide is lye. Diane uses lye when she makes soap. “You can’t have soap without lye,” Diane expains, “Lye + oil + water = soap.” Soaps that do not contain sodium hydroxide often contain alcohol. If a soap melts, it’s not real soap. Some soap makers try to hide the fact that lye is used in the process, Diane says, “but I like to be honest with my products.” In order to make soap, the ingredients must be heated and mixed together; the lye loses its caustic properties during this process.
When she’s busy in her workshop, Diane can put up a 65 pound flat of soap in a couple hours. Since she cuts the soap into 13 gram bars, 65 pounds go a long way! She usually has at least a half dozen soaps out in stores at once. Some rotate seasonally, while others, including High Sierra, are year round favorites. Meanwhile, her workshop is also her laboratory. She consistently experiments with new formulas for her soap as well as works on inventions for other skin care products. “It takes years for me to perfect a recipe,” she explains with a smile. She doesn’t mind, though, because Diane Longacre clearly and simply loves making soap.
Diane writes articles about soap and keeps a blog for her customers at www.frontierangel.com. Her articles about shea butter and lye can be found at http://www.frontierangel.com/shea_butter.html and
http://www.frontierangel.com/why_lye.html respectively.
