A shocking development in my perfume journey happened. And I think it was because of this name of this website, witchesandpagans. Or possibly the pagan and heathen religious content of my post "What Is Beauty?" I think I may have just been discriminated against on the basis of religion. Perhaps I am mistaken? There is no way for me to check, though, because I can't access the basenotes site to ask. This is the story of what happened.

On a different website, someone recommended Basenotes as a site where people discuss making their own perfume, so of course I wanted to participate. When I signed up I looked around their forum to see where would be a good place to start participating in their community, and found an entire board called Shameless Self Promotion. The rules said you can't promote your products but you can promote your blog. So I looked at all the posts here on my blog to find one where I was talking about perfume but not promoting any of my products, and also not promoting anyone else's products. In fact I thought it safest to choose one where I didn't even mention the names of any products. So it couldn't be one of the ones where I list perfumes for the seasons or for offering to the gods because that could be considered promotion. I decided on the post "What Is Beauty?" because it's purely my thoughts about the subject, no promoting or selling involved.

As I always do when I'm posting something from my Asatru blog on social media or a forum that is not dedicated to religion, I put in one of my standard introductions, something like, "It says I can promote my blog here so here is my blog. My post "What Is Beauty?" is my reflections on that topic related to my perfume journey. This is a religion post on my heathen and pagan blog, so if you don't want to read about that subject don't click." Then I posted the link to that blog post, which of course has the website address of Pagansquare, which is witchesandpagans.

And the next time I went to access the site I got an error saying the site had banned my IP address.

I've gotten negative reactions before on various social media because of the website address having the word witches in it, but it's always only been individual people commenting. No site has ever given me any problems about it before, not even the notoriously censorship-heavy social media sites.

Here is what Basenotes didn't want you to read:

https://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/gnosis-diary/what-is-beauty.html