BPAL is the wankiest fandom I regularly encounter, mostly because it's sort of a series of concentric circles: an inner circle of Beth-adorers and rabid personality fans who squee madly over every development and defend Beth and her honor and her artistry from every conceivable attack including negative reviews of anything she may have created, surrounded by a group of shy hangers-on who kind of want to be part of the inner circle but also kind of don't like some of the perfumes or the two-month ship times and is that... um... okay?, surrounded by a slightly bemused majority who quite like the concepts and many of the scents but don't exactly see why they should take multiple paragraphs to thank the Lab for their amazing consideration in sending us the things we ordered plus free samples when most e-tailers do the same and in less time, and then some very, very, very angry people who really, really hate BPAL and everything it stands for. And in the very, very center of all this is Beth herself, who is-- well, I'm sure she's a lovely
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Well, it stands for... um... I dunno, it sort of has this goth-based, Practitioners of the Old Ways mystique, and there's a great deal of hoohah about how these perfumes are better than any other perfume, not just because they smell better but because they are so creative and unique and essential and consecrated and... well, it's largely about how we worship the lightest works of Beth's hands and the slimmest fronds of her holy dreadlocks.
Seriously, I really love the poetical, gothy, mythology/history/literature-based names and copy she creates for her scents as well as the scents themselves-- I have always found that such things greatly add to my experience of any given product. And I love the vast range of scents available, and the fact that they encompass a lot of scent combinations you can't find elsewhere. I consider Beth a talented and unique artist whose art I very much enjoy. But I also consider her kind of a drama queen, so I view the whole "Beth's personal cult of adorers" aspect of BPAL fandom with a bit of eyebrow.
I like *some* BPAL scents. By that I mean maybe 6 of them. They are pretty but they aren't the holy grail of perfume. In fact to be honest a lot of them smell awful. Is Beth a talented scent creator? Maybe. Is she is genius? Hardly. And she really could make use of some basic business sense too. 4 weeks for an order. Updates that that throw the production line into chaos every 12 weeks. Making up scents 5mls at a time when they have a shelf life of a year anyway. 1,000 scents of which less than 20% of them are ordered with any regularity
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Seriously, I really love the poetical, gothy, mythology/history/literature-based names and copy she creates for her scents as well as the scents themselves-- I have always found that such things greatly add to my experience of any given product. And I love the vast range of scents available, and the fact that they encompass a lot of scent combinations you can't find elsewhere. I consider Beth a talented and unique artist whose art I very much enjoy. But I also consider her kind of a drama queen, so I view the whole "Beth's personal cult of adorers" aspect of BPAL fandom with a bit of eyebrow.
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