starfish327

and this is exactly why i stick with bpal. beth does use oils which appeals to me and works better with my wonky skin- but beyond that, i don't like wearing what other people are wearing. i knit for the same reason. i know that i'm not wearing a completely unique blend (i could go to strange brews down the street, get my own oils, and mix them myself if i wanted that) but it's a lot less common than the stuff that i can smell on five seperate people walking through the student union at the local campus.

Smells delicious. okay now that was just mean...points up. Don't you know I'm a mean mean girl? (AHH! I just noticed Pyramid Head in your sigline! Holy crap, that's awesome! And so appropriate! And awesome!) thank you. i am full out scary fan girl. check my photobucket- i did one for the great sword of war and one of my gore shock icons is a medical monster from SH2.

I guess it comes down to worrying or at least feeling like I'm being cheated or deceived. I want to buy products from people who care about excellence, not price or prolific production of a new perfume every other day. I don't want to be fooled by creative copy. Maybe Beth is spending day in and day out in the lab dutifully mixing her own essential oils to create violet, musk, amber or sandalwood from scratch. Maybe you all are right. But the blog comments planted a pretty big seed of doubt that I'm having trouble uprooting. the only response that i have to that is that perhaps you need to be reading other reviewers then and try to get a balanced view of reviews that aren't just bpal is horrible (which seems to be the standpoint of the original critic- that it's cheap and for people who don't know any better) or the boards where people are going to tell you that it's great. again though i think what people are trying to suggest is that excellence generally has very little to do with price. reputation maybe and name recognition, but not excellence. in all honesty though it really does sound that even if you love the imps that you get that you're never going to be comfortable with the company, and to each his own. i think everyone probably has at least product that they're like that with (you'll never get me in the same room as an iphone, i think it's all hype).

Smells delicious. okay now that was just mean...points up.

the truly annoying part about all this is that i really do want grilled cheese right now and i can't have it.

Ok, ok. Fair enough. I suppose we can both stand a bit of honest from the other side, however misinformed we think each other are. Thanks for keeping it civil. Notes that I like? Hmm. Amber, incense, smoke. Grass and woods (sandlewood, cedar, cyprus). Vetiver. Cardamom. Vanilla. Lavender. Citrus, but not too heavy. you'd like most everything that i've liked then: st. john's eve, the great sword of war, akuma, dee, nephilim, torture king (but torture king's getting increasingly hard to find but black death's supposed to be similar).

I'm sorry but that sentiment makes me really angry. This is exactly what you accuse BPAL of doing. So maybe you should sit back a minute and think of whether we should be just as mad at you. Beth takes enormous amounts of pride in her work and will take YEARS to perfect a blend. It is RIDICULOUSLY insulting to say that she just slaps together fragrance oils like a generic chain candle maker. You should have read the FAQ and About Us sections of the site, and the FAQ section of this board before you started making judgements. You know... I would really take what you said more seriously if BPAL didn't produce hundreds of fragrances every year for the exact same (very low) price. The people on Luca Turin's blog had a point about the basic logistics/economics of it all. I'm trying to do the reading suggested by so far I'm still left uneasy. And for the record, while I did quote people who compared bpal to velveeta, I never endorsed their view. just out of curiosity, why? you still haven't said why that makes a difference to you. and they NOT all the same price. it may not be an astronomical difference but the more complex LEs do run at least 2 to 5 dollars more expensive. okay i'm going to expand on my line of thought on this, with a medium i'm much more comfortable with. i'm a handspinner- i spin my own yarn. you can have fiber A costing $10 an ounce from one 'house' and costing anywhere between $10 and $20 an ounce from other 'houses'. there can be some discernible difference, but generally it's a matter of production cost, not quality. if fiber A comes out of a house where it's say $2 an ounce i might be concerned but i'll try it first before i start saying that it's too cheap to be quality because everyone else sells it at a higher margin. if there's fiber B, with fiber B being a blended line that's being sold at $10 an ounce but everyone else is selling at higher prices based on colors, if anything, i'd be concerned that there was so much variation for essentially the same product, especially if other 'houses' are selling at roughly the same price point (which BPAL is for its market, actually). meaning that i'd be wondering if they're sinking their money into packaging and advertising as opposed to the actual product and are inflating their costs that way. i want to pay for the product, not the reputation. i actually got into bpal because someone gave me imps randomly a couple of years ago.

To add to this, it's common that the way perfume reacts to your body chemistry changes around your period. It can also depend on and differ with changes in your diet, stress level, activity level, and many other factors. oh yeah. anything with even a hint of amber or incense turns into the exact same scent on my skin for three days of the month. it's more than slightly annoying.

i apparently never got around to posting my review of lump of coal, so here we go: brownies. end of story. brownie batter, baking brownies, fresh brownies. unfortunately i think it's too strong for me, but i was more than grateful for the chance to test it.

traded a testable rare that i'll never use but was glad to test for this and an imp of perversion from a very close friend. 2008 version. in the imp: fruit compote. seriously. it smells like brown betty. wet: crumb topping on the compote. spiced sugar. dry: spiced caramel. it's burnt sugar with fruit undertones. STRONG, and high throw. i wore my normal imp swipe and i'm in a caramel haze. hopefully it's settle down a little before my boy comes home from work.

This was really helpful. Thank you so much. Your comment felt really...honest. (And thanks to other people who responded! I'm kind of overwhelmed right now with links and comments...) Well, I went to makeupalley and picked out the most popular, generally appealing ones I could find: Snake Oil, Dorian, White Rabbit, Old Morocco, Dana O'Shee, and Vixen. I was really hoping to find a smooth smokey lavender but I didn't want to risk it early on without being more educated. if you can find it on a sales board try to find a sniffie of a farewell to false love. if i remember right it's smooth lavender, i don't remember about the smoky part, but you could layer it with another blend.

Agreed! (Also, I don't want to appear to be backseat modding, I just wanted to put my two cents in that I'm not getting the troll-vibe right now.) Hmmm, not gonna lie. When I was a newbie to this forum, it was difficult to find information like that, even with the search function. Lol, I just gave up, made an introduction and hoped that somehow, it would take me to an answer. honestly i do have to admit that this board does have one of the worst search engines of the boards that i frequent. i normally just poke around the relevant sub forums until i find what i need.

most likely, but compared to the trolls that i normally have to deal with this is pretty low key...and i'm just cranky.

Well... I'm not trying to disparage BPAL or anything. Honestly, I just started learning about it recently. But I've been buying $3 samples from The Perfumed Court for the past year. I can get just about anything from there. BPAL is actually a little more expensive. I guess I've just been immersed in the world of traditional perfumery for awhile. People take a lot of pride in craftsmanship, on assembling their perfumes molecule by molecule or using the finest essential oils. Maybe I am being a bit prejudiced... i think the problem for a lot of people is that you're implying that without knowing the source, bpal is automatically at a lower level of craftsmanship. even if she did order her oils from somewhere else, how do you know that beth isn't "[taking] a lot of pride in [her] craftmanship" or 'assembling' the perfume molecule by molecule?

it is my impression that they are eo-s sourced from other companies. from what i understand from people who actually distill their own oils for ritual use, it's really not all that easy to on a mass scale unless you're planning on just distillation, it's much easier to just purchase from a source.

the cynic in me would want to know if you, or they, have any documented proof that they're right. the first quote is a critical statement- not all critical statements on anything are going to be positive, and the quote itself states that she's not all that familiar with the company. okay, some people may put weight behind that, but i treat those types of reviews the same way as i do yarn reviews of a similar nature. you're reviewing a product line with that many items in it and you're just going to bash the entire thing? sorry, but i'm going to take it with a grain of salt- the reviewer may be well known but she's admitting to not having a strong familiarity with what she's reviewing, and to each his own. however, i do find reviews of anything suggesting that what i like is lowbrow to be frankly insulting. i also wouldn't put too much weight into what commenters are saying- so they're claiming that they're perfurmers. there's no proof. they're just stating opinions at this point. maybe i just spent way too much time on snark boards but if anything someone stating that they're x or y is enough to make me stop reading unless it's a respected source. e-comments like that are not respected sources in my mind. beyond that, i'm confused with your general statement. are you interested in the source of oils? because if you are, i have to agree- based on the quotes that you posted from the critic that you appear to think highly of, you already have your answer.

i was born in st johns so i was interested in seeing what this blend was like, and was lucky enough to be frimped some off the boards. in the imp: really heavy smoke and vetiver. the first time i opened the imp i thought bbq and didn't test until now. wet: spicy smoke. this really does smell like hot ashes. dry: it looses some of its smoky-ness and becomes much more spicy. i can almost get something sweet but i'm not sure if that's just because i know that it has rum in it now. luckily i'm not getting rose out of this at all because i normally amp rose into a floral mess. this is nice. this is really nice.

in the imp: wine. this is bright red. this is screamingly bright red the way that suck it is for me, but this is wine instead of koolaide. wet: sharp and boozy. this isn't just red wine this is berry wine in particular, and something dark like gooseberry or elderberry. this smells like summer nights at my grandfather's when he was still doing his own distilling. dry: warmer, dryer, almost spiced- i'm getting something that's turning almost plasticy on my skin like amber does when my hormones are raging. but the plastic fades after awhile. this is STRONG, to the point that i was actually almost concerned about what would happen when i made it to work today- i smelled like i had been rolling in wine. this is winter wine, not something light and summery. i don't normally see scents being seasonal but this is definitely a cold weather blend. coincedentally this smelled AMAZING with the oil from the tangelo that i had for breakfast this morning. it lasted forever too- close to 12 hours later and my boyfriend told me to wear less next time.

This will be an ongoing and updated list! Bolded entries are what I'm willing to swap away immediately- bad, bad skin chemistry issues. Italics are ones that I am not interested in swapping/selling at this time. absinthe aelophile akuma Arcana baku bordello chaos theory v clxxxi chimera crib girls crossroad-needs to be relabeled, using as a ritual oil danse macabre ded moroz dee 2x dioble en bote Dragon's Heart dragon's hide farewell to false love hecate incubus J Horror king of hearts ladon Laudanum Le Père Fouettard lump of coal mason and jenkins port jelly mother shub's toothsome banketstaaf nemesis nephilim 2x perversion P Horror plunder prurience (sniff) riding the goat Santa Eularia Des Riu sapphics sleipnir (spelling?) snow maiden spooky res st. john's eve suck it sugar skull tavern of hell 2x the coil- partial the coiled serpent the great sword of war 2x the music of erich zahn tisiphone torture king the ides of march[/b tushnamatay vice yew trees tea party- new, sale only NOT FOR TRADE (wedding favors) queen of hearts high strung daisies wishlist: German Expressionist Horror A Bachelor's Dog The Grand Inquisitor's Heretic's Fork -any of the four lick its -any weenies AEVAL Anne Bonny Aperotos Eros Archangel Winter BARON SAMEDI belladonna BELLE ÉPOQUE Bengal BLACK FOREST Block Buster Bonfire Night Brimstone Calico Jack chimera clemence Crowley CZERNOBOG de sade (but only in a sniffie) Death of Autumn dee Devil's Night Djinn Doc Constantine, Act II: Fiat Nox Faunalia fenris wolf GRANDMOTHER OF GHOSTS hades Hellfire Hexxenacht HIGHWAYMAN Himerus holly king Jabberwocky Kali LAMPADES Loup Garou Love and Pain Mama Ji mata hari oak king oberon On Darkness Pais de la Canela Priala Red Devil red lantern Rumpelstilzchen Samhainophobia Sin skadi smut snow moon Strangler Fig THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM THE BLACK RIDER THE BLACK TOWER the catapillar the dodo the Goblin Ride The Great He Goat THE JERSEY DEVIL THE LIGHTS OF MEN'S LIVES the music of erich zahn THE OBSIDIAN WIDOW Tintagel Titus Andronicus torture king Ulalume Van Van White Light wraith YEMAYA

in the imp: musky and light. it's not sweet though. wet: musk and patchouli dry: musk and patchouli with a hint of other notes in the background. my sinuses are screaming at me today but it's nice from what i can tell, so i will probably continue to like it.

lab fresh imp in the imp: light white floral wet: sweet, creamy, white floral. there's nothing black about this. dry: delicate, white floral- really feminine. the word pretty comes to mind.

lab fresh imp in the imp: sharp and sweet. i have no idea what this actually smells like beyond that, no notes are sticking out for me. wet: sweet and then sour. i have a feeling this isn't going to work out on me. dry: soap and then something underneath it that's starting to rot. i still have no impression of individual notes, it's just a mess of ick on my skin. and it burned, so i think i'm allergic to it anyway.

lab fresh in the imp: mint and chocolate and earth. i'm not sure how i feel about this one. wet: earthy and masculine. i don't want to say that this is rugged or he.avy because it's not, but this is definitely guy all the way. dry: there used to be a commercial that knocked one of the body washes and sprays at young men that went something like "and this is what you wear when you want to smell assertive without reeking." this is like that. it's clean and confident and sexy as all hell. it's definitely masculine but not so heavy that i don't see myself wearing this. yeah i could see how this is an incubus. this has caramel in it? really? i normally amp the sugar in caramel to screeching levels but i'm not getting that from this blend at all.

fresh from the lab. THIS ONE HAS TO AGE. the vetiver is so screaming that to be honest, that's all that it is. i'm sure that this will be nice once it's calmed down a little.

fresh from lab in the imp: so um hespy why do you smell like my root cellar? cuz you do. you smell like carrots and parsnips. i prefer my parsnips in me not on me for the record. wet: soap, spice, and parsnips. now i'm just getting annoyed. really? parsnips? parsnips, my most loathed vegetable in my youth behind beets, why are you haunting me? dry: CERTS MINTS? how did we go from parsnips to breath mints? i'm really not sure how this happened actually, but that's what this blend just did. sorry hesps, this isn't going to work.