Goodbye for Now
Makeup shouldn’t be about vindictiveness. It should be about using your body as a canvas to express yourself. It should be about enhancing your beauty.
Right now, too much of it is about the former. And it’s sucking the fun right out of makeup for me.
I’ve watched a lot happen. I’ve spoken up when I had something to say, but over the last few weeks, I’ve taken a lot of flak for it. From people who might not know the whole story, from people who might blindly support any one side no matter what. From other beauty bloggers.
Disagreement can foster healthy debate. Name calling, insult-slinging can not.
I’ll be around; by all means, I’m not going away. But I’ll save my blogging for a time when honesty and constructiveness are valued higher than loyalty.
A Girl and Her Shadows 
Hope yo will be back soon :) I don’t know much about all this drama, I was on vacation (and maybe it’s better that way), I just want to use & buy makeup. LOL
I’m sorry this is happening. I’ve always enjoyed how forthright you are and will miss reading your blog. Hope you’re back soon.
Completely understand and support your statements. The ongoing drama has been awful/burdensome from a consumer point of view so I can only imagine it would be worse from a beauty bloggers perspective. I’m sorry to hear you’ve had such a hard time. For what it’s worth, I enjoy your forthright, researched point of view. I appreciate when someone tries to be constructive and honest-it’s a hard thing to do. I’m going to miss you posts and hope you’ll be back sooner rather than later :)
I think it’s a good idea for you to take a break. If and when you do return, I hope you come back as Shattered Shards, and not as Spiffariffic.
I’d like to raise two points with you, please. You allude to your belief in this post that the people who find your opinions objectionable and your behavior deplorable (such as me) are not fully aware of all the facts. (And I see you state this belief several times when you are Spiffariffic.)
I beg to differ. And I think it’s very arrogant for you to refuse to believe that people in this world might be in possession of all the facts that you possess, but they have come to a totally different conclusion. Take controversial jury trials, for instance. Or consider the intensely controversial presidential election results of 2000, and 2004.
I have followed everything in the blogosphere related to Aromaleigh since the winter of ’09. And I have been able to access older materials,too,such as the evolution of feelings on that MAC chatroom (the name escapes me, but it is the place where Jenna, as Moon something-or-other (another lapse, and this sucky computer will not let me search it without losing this comment.) praised Aromaleigh, but she then took those comments away this past spring.
So I do wish you’d reconsider believing and asserting that people of differing viewpoints only differ because they are ignorant.
Second, I would like to address your repeated statements both as Spiffariffic and here as Shattered Shards that the side with whom you differ is the vengeful one. I’d like to expand on a comment I saw whereby the poster said s/he felt confident that an uninvolved party would read all this information and conclude that it is not about make up at all. I’ll extrapolate and say that I believe if this material were shown to 100 uninvolved parties without any additional commentary from either side, that an overwhelming majority would find greater responsibility and 100% of the malice coming from “the uglies”.
Here’s something I find really unpleasant. I believe that I have been able to track your own descent from harsh-but-fair Shattered Shards to Spiffariffic. I really liked your comments on Jennifae’s blog when that particular sh!t hit the fan. I will paraphrase the gist that hit home with me. You strongly asserted that Kristin’s outburst was unprofessional, and you did not think it had any place in the world of MMU and small business. But I also loved that you were the only one in that sea of comments to call a spade a spade in regard to Jennifae. I agreed with you that she had been deliberately baiting, looking for some sort of reaction. And I really admired you for having the level-headedness to grasp that, and also the chutzpah to state something that was being lost in a sea of group-think.
Then, I guess, you saw what you thought was too much support for the belief that Kristin was being unfairly castigated. And you turned away from your previous position. You even posted about your change of heart right here in your blog. It was cryptic in the sense that you spoke in gereralities, but the next phase of your (de)evolution left to doubt as to what your ambiguous post meant…you became Spiffariffic.
In my opinion, Spiffariffic does not follow the golden rule, whereas Shattered Shards did. I do not need to use a bunch of nasty names to describe Spiffariffic because I think you catch my drift.
I thank you if you have read my comment all the way to the end.
I do have to disagree with you on a few points.
1) I want to clarify that I have specified that I have taken issue with only some of the more outspoken Kristen supporters, and that I don’t think all of them are ignorant to parts of the story. I will maintain that I believe some of them are very well ignorant, based on the things that have been said to me. The things I have seen can’t be said by people who have looked at both sides, because they contradict what has gone on. But that’s going to happen in any situation like this, that some people will not hear both sides, or might not even make any effort to hear both sides.
2) I have no issue with people who still support Kristen/AL. I have issue with the supporters that have gone so far as to, for example, wish physical harm on the people from R4TU. Two wrongs do not make a right, and I certainly don’t remember wishing any harm on Kristen or AL; I only wanted honesty, because I don’t feel like Kristen was giving it.
3) That was another thing that I tried to make clear on R4TU, as well as speaking up about the fact that I disagreed with some things that were being said by the other posters (in particular, the personal attacks). I didn’t publicly lambast the other posters, but I did make it clear to them, and I was critisized by another blogger simply because I didn’t publicly lambast them.
4) I had been seeing a lot of crap from Kisten for a long time, but I guess I was somewhat in denial about it. I wanted to believe that she was smart enough to not be doing the things she was doing. My “turn,” for lack of better terms, had nothing to do with Kristen’s support system and everything to do with her irrational behavior finally breaking the camel’s back. I hit a point where I couldn’t make excuses for her actions anymore. Examples? When I found out how she had been Twittering that her son was all upset over the Jenna thing, right after she outted Jenna. I couldn’t fathom why the heck her son would even know what exactly was going on, because, I believe, most parents wouldn’t expose their school-age child to something like that.
5) I can understand what you are saying about my decent to Spiffarriffic, and I don’t really disagree with it. I admit I became a bit bitter over everything, and that is my own fault. However, one of the main points of my mini-rant here was that I feel like the things that have been said to me or about me personally don’t even compare to what I have had to say about Kristen’s actions. I got a week and a half of angry emails from another blogger over it, where my every little action was critisized and insults were slung at me with refusal to cite why I deserved said insults. That’s going too far, and, sadly, it took me finally snapping and telling her off for her to stop.
I thank you for coming here and so calmly explaining your views on the matter; I have much respect for anyone who can keep a level head with this mess.
Thank you for responding, and so quickly, too. Your last paragraph really breaks my heart because I have a feeling that we are two people who would be unable to dislike each other/disagree with each other/you know what I mean, if only we were to be in the same room, fully able to read each others body language, etc.
I think that I do have some more things to say, not hateful things I promise, but I am going to take (at least) a day to think it over. Why? Because one of the people whom I really respect (MichelleB/purpleM) has displayed some admirable restraint whenever she has posted her thoughts about this issue. I’m going to try and follow her example. I hope you won’t mind if I respond an a day or two.
I can see that this issue is truly complicated because there are people on both sides who see the other side as being beyond the pale, beyond simply having a different “preference”. There is a belief that actual morality has been violated. And both sides feel this!!!!!!!!! This does not bode well for any hopes of a truce, which is really unfortunate.
Oh, I definately have no problem with you waiting to respond. To be honest, if I could hug you for giving me a rational discussion about this, I would. The majority of what I’ve seen is been pretty immature, and, personally, I know I’ve had a problem with not responding in kind, perhaps partially because I feel like an attempt at maturity will fall on deaf ears at this point.
:) :) :) :) :)