[instead of posting in the H&EE thread, I told people there that I would write my opinions here instead.]

Very brief background if you have no idea what's going on here: Heaven & Earth Essentials is an etailer that sells perfume oils and bath & body products. The owner's name is Michele; her account name in this forum is anxious1. She has been a member here since November 2005. The thread for her business was started here in January 2006.

So, let me give you a hypothetical scenario.

How well do you think it would go over if a new BPAL competitor joined the BPAL forum and almost immediately asked what the most popular BPAL scents are? And what if she also asked how people were getting a hold of unreleased BPAL scents? I bet people might think that was odd -- if they knew she was a competitor. However in this scenario, the new competitor hasn't revealed herself as a competitor yet. She has only said that she is the business owner of an unrelated business and a LUSH fan.

OK, what if she then started buying a whole bunch of BPAL bottles, and then she resold them to BPAL fans on the BPAL forum for a profit. Say you look at her sales post in March and you see FORTY-THREE BPAL GC 5mls on her sales post for $14 each. Think that would go over very well? Yes -- you read that right. A BPAL competitor making money for herself off of BPAL products directly under the nose of the BPAL owner. Not only that, but you happen to notice in someone's post from April that this new competitor was also putting samples of her own oils in with the BPAL packages she sold to people.

How about if she then started talking up her own company on the BPAL forum, communicating directly to BPAL customers about her own business. She was answering questions about her products, telling people when their orders shipped, and announcing new product updates on her site. (You are aware that running the BPAL forum takes money and time. You think it's strange that this competitor is allowed to use the BPAL forum for free as her own personal communication tool for her business.) Say the forum administrator warns the new competitor a couple of times that she's breaking the etailer rules -- which are outlined clearly for all to see -- but the new competitor doesn't change her ways. The forum adminstrator then makes her customer service posts invisible and restricts her access to some of the other parts of the forum. The new competitor says it was just a misunderstanding on her part.

Keep in mind that until this new competitor had her access restricted, she had access to all the members' posts about which scents they liked and didn't like. Just like any other forum member. She had access to etailer threads of her other competitors, where she could see what people liked and didn't like about those businesses as well.

[ETA: please see shriekingviolet's comment below for a correction about the above paragraph.]

When people on the BPAL forum ask the new competitor about her ingredients in her oils, the new competitor says in one case that she has made a couple of mistakes on her site and that she doesn't really use a Chocolate EO; in another case she said that she uses real ambergis. At that time, she also had Lily of the Valley EO and Lilac EO for sale on her site -- but you've been reading this newsletter, which contains some conflicting information. A little bit of foreshadowing here: Later, in a post in another thread, she says she's been a "perfumer" for 20 years. You might wonder how a "perfumer" with that much experience would mix up what's an essential oil and what's not, or how a person with so much experience in the field could possibly not know that real ambergis is illegal.

Then this competitor comes out with a new perfume that is remarkably like one of BPAL's most recently released AND most wildly popular Limited Editions. She mentions that she "has been told" that her version has more buttery vanilla. She says it's a coincidence and nothing more. When asked about her ISO for that particular BPAL LE only a few weeks before her own very similar oil was introduced, she changes her tune and admits that she did in fact try that BPAL oil (she hasn't just "been told" about it), and she says she wanted more of it because she liked it. She claims that her version of the scent had been in the works for months. Just coincidence, she said.

During the blow-up about this remarkably similar product, the new competitor states that she loves BPAL and respects Beth, and in fact she only wears Beth's oils and not her own. You can't help but notice that for all her proclaimed love of BPAL, this new competitor has up until that point posted exactly one BPAL review in the forum, and it was to say that MB Closet smelled like cat pee.

In a discussion about using stock oils in scents, the new competitor calls herself a "perfumer" and says "I don't do dupes and I don't relabel." Yet when you look at her site you see a dupe of LUSH's Karma right there!

And say that BPAL has been doing, oh, I don't know, a special Limited Edition scent called "Cinco" on Cinco de Mayo for the past two years, and suddenly this new competitor comes out with her own product called "Five" especially for Cinco de Mayo too. But she says, once again, that hers has been in the works for a long time and that it is merely another coincidence.

Finally, the forum administrator of the BPAL forum comes into this new competitor's thread to explain that the new competitor's account has been suspended because she broke the forum rules by creating a duplicate account. She used the duplicate account to get around restrictions that were placed on her first account so that she could snoop about BPAL's business and BPAL's fans some more. The administrator can prove this with IP addresses showing duplicate accounts accessed from the new competitor's home and work. (And your husband is a Database Administrator, so you know perfectly well what IP addresses are and how they are logged.) The administrator also says that the new competitor has been borrowing a friend's login to browse the BPAL forum as well. She says she was posting under the friend's login as well.

At this point, how many people do you guess would be big fans of this new competitor and unwilling to believe that she has exhibited some shady business practices?

You guys, Michele has done every single one of those things and they are all recorded in the BPAL fan forum. Check her posts. It's all right there. (Except that her customer service posts in the H&EE thread were made invisible, so I'm just going off memory there.) I swear to you, I am not making this up. Every single bit of information in that huge "hypothetical" scenario above came from Michele's own posts and the H&EE thread. All I did was put it in one place.

Please note that you can look at all her posts yourself by going into her profile (anxious1), clicking on Profile Options, and choosing the View Member's Posts option. This is all right there, out in the open for anyone to see.

So here are my major concerns:

- I don't like re-selling BPAL for profit in any case, but I think it is especially reprehensible behavior for a BPAL competitor. Bad form. To the nth degree.

- On top of that, I think that slipping some samples of her perfume oils into her BPAL sales packages is... well, I want to say it's a dirty trick, but I'll leave it as just saying completely disrespectful and inappropriate.

- She was not upfront about her status as a BPAL competitor when she joined this forum and started asking questions about the most popular BPAL scents and how people get a hold of unreleased scents. That's called market research. This tactic in particular makes me angry. I did not write my reviews and posts here so that a BPAL competitor could come along and use what I've written to think up new ideas to make herself money. I resent that.

- I might have bought her story about one "coincidence" of copying BPAL. Maybe. But two? Nope. Fool me once...

- Someone who supposedly has 20 years of experience with perfumes really ought to know what's an essential oil and what's not. She also ought to know that real ambergis is illegal. I don't believe she's telling the truth about her experience. Also she claimed to have a Lilac EO (and a couple of others). I don't believe she's telling the truth about her ingredients, either.

- She refused to sell her products to olympia301, citing oly's post in the H&EE thread as the reason why. (Oly questioned a couple of Michele's ingredients.) Nobody, and I mean no one, should get retribution from an etailer for comments they make about that etailer on bpal.org. That's just wrong. By the same token, people who consistently post glowing remarks about the etailer in bpal.org should not receive preferential treatment by the etailer.

- She used bpal.org as a free service to communicate with current customers and answer questions of potential customers. No, wait, I should clarify that. It was free to her -- but it was not free. Someone was paying for it. The fans of her competitor were paying for it. The only thing that stopped her from using it for her own purposes was having her account restricted. Just asking her to stop didn't do the trick.

Michele has said several times that the reasons for issues with her were misunderstandings or coincidences. I just flat-out do not believe her. She said she is the manager of a Fortune 500 IT department, and she owns her needlework business as well as her bath & body business. Clearly this is not a stupid person. I think she knew exactly what she was doing when she came to the BPAL forum: She was reading all our posts and finding out which scents we like best and why. She was studying up on other etailers and their products. She was noticing how much money people are willing to spend on perfume oils and on bath and body products. She was buying up Beth's oils like mad and then just sniffing or testing them and re-selling them for a profit. She found a HUGE potential market here -- not to mention free market research -- and she exploited it. In my opinion, that's the bottom line. She saw what was going on here and decided she wanted a piece of the action.

Let me draw some comparisons between Michele and roostersgrrl. Both of them:

- Tried to come off as BPAL fans in order to be welcomed into the community.

- Were secretly (or not so secretly) using this community to pad their own pocketbooks.

- Hawked their own wares to BPAL fans inside the BPAL community.

- Claimed innocence and misunderstandings whenever anyone brought up issues with them.

- Showed a blatant disregard and disrespect for the Lab.

- Had nearly every mod breathing down their necks at every turn... which they used to try to convince people that they were being unjustly persecuted and singled out.

In roostersgrrl's case there was a very good reason for that attention from the mods -- don't you think it's likely that in Michele's case there's a very good reason for it too? I look at that H&EE thread, and I see red flags everywhere. Warning sirens screaming, horns blowing, the whole nine yards. And I'm quite sure that the mods know a lot more about this situation than they're telling us.

Roostersgrrl got basically exiled from the community for what she did, but people are still buying Michele's products and talking about them in bpal.org. A lot of people have said things like "well, that's between Michele and the mods" and "whatever else she does doesn't matter because she's nice to me." That's exactly what people said about roostersgrrl too, you guys. I said those things. Then later I felt like a schmuck for having been duped by roostersgrrl. I don't want that same sort of thing to happen all over again -- a lot of the people who post in the H&EE thread are people I like and care about. I think Michele is pulling the wool over their eyes, and it bothers me a lot. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the mods are wrong, maybe everyone who has noticed something fishy about Michele is wrong. But there are quite a few of us who feel this way.

So do I have too much time on my hands and should I get a job in a research library? PROBABLY. However, I'm not posting this for my sake. What I want is to put this here so that in the future someone won't end up in the situation I was in with the roostersgrrl fiasco: "Why didn't anyone tell me about this stuff?!?" Here it is. I'm telling you.

If it seems like I'm singling out Michele, it's because I visit this site every day, and I read a lot of the threads. I haven't noticed any other etailer behaving like Michele has. Not one. She's the only one who is doing this. I don't have a problem with her products -- they're not for me, but I'm not going to say that no one could possibly enjoy them. That's just not true. Plenty of people like them a lot. What earned Michele my criticism isn't her products or her company -- it's her behavior here in her competitor's fan forum. If she had never come into this forum, I probably wouldn't have ever said a bad word about her.