Bellesa Plus claims to have the ‘#1 rated ethical porn platform‘. Their adult VOD service is described as being centered around ‘porn for women‘.
Well, that doesn’t tell the full story. This is porn for everyone, really, and in fact, porn by women would be a better description.
In terms of its functionality, Bellesa Plus is a premium subscription platform where you get access to original productions from Bellesa and licensed third-party media from well-known content studios. Samples from their tour point toward higher production values and slightly more artistic approaches to adult content creation – quite a bit different from the porn aesthetic we saw in the 2000s and 2010s.
We signed up to test the service. Here’s our full review and analysis of Bellesa Plus.
Bellesa Plus Review: Tapping into Ethical Porn Streaming
Montreal-based Bellesa was founded in 2017, but their Plus platform has only been around since 2021. It marks a clear foray into two distinct growth markets: ethical porn and Netflix-style streaming.
We’ve heard a lot about porn made for women over the last few years. This site was launched by Michelle Shnaidman, a Psychology major who felt alienated by the typical mainstream approach to porn. She wanted to spotlight ‘relatable bodies’ and ‘authentic pleasure,’ selling points that are clearly evident in the content for which Bellesa has become known.
Still, a successful VOD service is about more than public soundbites and ethical gimmicks. We wanted to see if there’s enough under the hood to justify a rather pricy monthly subscription.
How does Bellesa Plus stack up against other adult streaming services like Adult Empire, Adult Time and Bang?
Let’s take a closer look.
First Impressions
If you want to learn a little more about Bellesa’s approach to adult content creation, they have a blog post here that you can read – it goes into quite a lot of detail about their structure, preferences and ethics.
The take-home message here is that Bellesa wants to create media that’s different from what you’ll find in most modern porn studios. They focus on performer chemistry, genuine pleasure, safety and comfort. Note that this doesn’t mean the porn is always soft and nurturing in nature: some women like it rough, so there’s still plenty of the hard stuff waiting for you on the other side.
The platform makes a clear effort to avoid genres that might be considered ‘tacky’ by its primary audience. For example, one thing that some male users might not be so happy with is that Bellesa doesn’t create any faux-incest content.
You won’t find stepsisters or stepdads as themes. We’re unconvinced that these are ethically questionable plot devices, but hey – Bellesa’s free to create whatever it wants, and we won’t get our panties in a twist because it lacks this specific genre of content!
Bellesa, as a studio, took home AVN’s 2019 award for the Best New Production Banner. We were looking forward to checking out their originals to see just how good they are and if the hype is justified.
Here’s what you’ll be presented with when you go to sign up to Bellesa Plus:
We kicked up a fuss in our review of Bang for not being clear about the limits of its 2-day trial: Bellesa Plus does say that you have ‘limited streaming access’, but isn’t exactly clear on what that means.
We’re also unimpressed with the monthly rebilling at $39.99 – especially when a standard 30-day membership costs just $19.99. This is quite a standard practice in the adult space, but we’d really like to know how they justify this as an ‘ethical’ company.
We bit the bullet and signed up for the 2-day trial to gather some data. Firstly, in the footer of the signup section, you’re presented with the following information:
We praised Bang for their automatic cancellation process: we were pleased to see that Bellesa Plus promised the same thing. However, once inside, it was evident that there is no ‘pause’ or ‘cancel’ button: you’re told that you have to email them instead:
As with limited trials, this is a standard practice in the industry. We expect more from a company calling itself ethical, but we especially expect more from a company calling itself ethical and promising a simple cancellation system before you hand over your credit card details, then not delivering a simple cancellation system.
We generally don’t spend much time analyzing billing practices, but considering the circumstances, effort was definitely warranted here. Bellesa should be doing a lot better than it currently is if it wants to be taken seriously as an ‘ethical’ porn company.
Channels
A number of studios contribute material to Bellesa Plus, alongside their large archive of original productions.
While the likes of Adult Time and AEBN are agnostic with regard to their sourcing, it’s quite clear that Bellesa Plus has focused on quality instead of quantity. We’re familiar with a lot of the production houses showcased on their channels page – you’ll find the likes of Passion HD, Hot Guys Fuck, Viv Thomas, Hard X, Vixen, Tushy and BAEB.
Most of the studios only have part of their archives hosted here.
For instance, there are 21 uploads from Exotic 4K, but the Exotic 4K paysite had just over 170 uploads last time we checked. There is a page devoted to showing the available channels, but you’ll also find that the sidebar has a nifty feature for this: it’s even ordered based on the number of scenes each studio has.
Rival platforms such as Adult Time and Bang also have the same structure, but the numbers at Bellesa Plus are quite a bit lower as a percentage of the source studio’s total collection.
We counted 52 studios in total, including original productions from Bellesa.
Videos
Quantity
As of December 2023, Bellesa Plus has 1,861 unique porn videos that you can watch. Historically, we’ve seen licensed material have issues with regard to length – studios sometimes only give third-parties access to a portion of their productions. That’s not the case with Bellesa Plus: we found no evidence that they don’t get full access to the scenes they gather from other studios.
Analysis of the latest 20 videos uploaded here shows an average length of 33 minutes and 11 seconds. You’re looking at around 900 hours of porn housed inside Bellesa Plus – well over a month of 24/7 viewing. These numbers are quite good in isolation, but truth be told, it doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of Bang and Adult Empire, who have far more than this platform.
We can’t really criticize, though, since Bellesa is clearly prioritizing quality over quantity.
Quality
Since some content is licensed here, expect some variation with regard to supported formats and more importantly, bitrates. We began with a look at the latest Belle-produced scene: the stream defaulted to 720p, but we could manually switch to 1080p, 1440p and 4K. The inclusion of 1440p is relatively uncommon, but we really do appreciate it – monitors in this resolution are the right middle ground between 1080p and 4K.
The scene we looked at had the following bitrates: 4 Mb/s at 1080p, 7 Mb/s at 1440p and 14.2 Mb/s at 4K.
If we were splitting hairs, maybe a slight bump in the 4K scene bitrate would be preferable: our understanding is that once 17 Mb/s is reached, it’s pretty difficult for people to tell the difference. No complaints whatsoever about the bitrates as a whole, though. More than sufficient.
Download Speed
Bellesa Plus is supposed to be a stream-only platform. Generally speaking, we avoid talking about download speeds for streaming platforms, since they often make it quite difficult for you to grab the files. That’s not the case at Bellesa Plus, though. If you know how to utilize inspect element, it’s trivially easy to download complete scenes. Whether or not you do this is up to you, but the functionality is there.
We were extremely impressed with the download speeds we received, too: Bellesa Plus allowed us to average the highest throughput we’ve received from a site in this category.
A 6.46 GB file took us a total of 1 minute and 22 seconds to complete. Note that we utilized a Gigabit connection to reach these speeds – most readers won’t have a connection this good. This means that Bellesa Plus will never be the bottleneck.
The download speeds translate well to the streaming experience. It takes less than a second for you to jump ahead in the footage and for it to begin playing: definitely reaching the theoretical limits of what’s possible.
Content Analysis
Bellesa Plus does have a categories section, but unfortunately, it was completely blank when we visited it – hopefully this is just a temporary issue that they fix at a later date. The main video display page does have a list of categories and a check box for them though: this makes finding the type of scene you want a little easier.
Unfortunately, the categories aren’t that useful.
It’s fine if some of these appeal to your tastes, but what if what you want isn’t tagged here? Examples of tags we might want include ethnicities (Asian, Latina, ebony, etc.), MILF, feet and massage.
Of course, Bellesa would argue that those tags are less in demand for ‘female friendly porn’, and perhaps they’d have a fair point.
You can garner a little information regarding the scenes they do have here based on the available tags – group sex is far more common as a percentage of the overall content pool here than it is on sites such as Adult Time and Bang.
We also found zero amateur productions – all of the stars in these scenes are paid for the sex and most of them aren’t first-time performers. There are some quasi-amateur releases (Hot Guys Fuck and My Very First Time being prime examples), but don’t expect any genuine homemade flicks.
Bellesa Plus doesn’t have any gay content. Straight sex – alongside the odd lesbian release – is their market of choice. There’s a definite focus here on higher-quality studios and productions. Most scenes are new (created after, say, 2018) and utilize attractive sets, good equipment and so on. Nothing at Bellesa Plus feels like it came from a bargain bin.
Low-budget DVDs from the early 2000s aren’t added to the database here just to pad their numbers, which is another example of the executive decisions being made: quality over quantity.
Original Content
Perhaps the biggest drawcard of Bellesa Plus is their full suite of exclusive productions across a number of channels.
Themes here are slightly more in-depth than your standard megasite: plot and preamble make up more of the scene than you’d typically find elsewhere. Let’s take a look at a few of the ideas Bellesa utilizes for its originals:
- Bellesa House: these scenes kick off with an interview between two pornstars who talk about what they like, a little about their history in the industry, and then they get it on. There aren’t any scripts here; it’s just hardcore action with a lot of talk and realism. The shoots are pretty low-budget, but the action feels real.
- Bellesa House Party: a pornstar invites their favorite co-stars to come along to a sexy house party. Sometimes it’s three ladies having an all-girl session, other times it’s 3 guys and 3 girls enjoying a full-on orgy. These scenes are typically an hour or so in length and can spread across multiple rooms.
- Zero To Hero: Shawn Alff wants to make it big as a pornstar, but he has to begin as a production assistant first. See how he climbs through the ranks and ends up banging some of the biggest names in the game. Co-stars here include the likes of London River, Alexis Tae and Lexi Luna.
Bellesa’s in-house productions have a lot more real dialog and meta porn discussion than elsewhere.
At times, it comes across more as more of a behind-the-scenes docu-series than actual porn. This isn’t a bad thing – there’s still a lot of sex here: you just get some extras sandwiched at either end so you remember that the performers are real people.
Based on an interview conducted with Lulu Chu before one of her scenes, it seems as if Bellesa is leaning away from ethnic references in porn – at least in their own productions.
We think their resistance against incest themes is somewhat reasonable, but we’ve yet to come across a coherent argument as to why having a specific preference for Asian, Latina or ebony content is a problem. It’s especially confusing when they’ve licensed a number of interracial scenes starring black men and white women – a form of content that’s far more contentious for its leaning into racial stereotypes and taboo themes.
Virtual Reality
Currently, Bellesa doesn’t produce any VR content itself – nor does it license any that you can watch. We’ll update this review if they eventually decide to add virtual reality porn to their library.
Design & Navigation
Niche categorization could be better, but we suspect this isn’t an oversight – they want to avoid specific genres and topics, even if it means that their site is more difficult to navigate and for users to find their preferred type of media.
Preview panes should probably have 4K instead of HD if they have a 4K option – three of the six scenes above were available in 4K, but you wouldn’t know that if you just looked at the archive page. An inclusion of the pornstar lanes below the scene length would be nice – as well as a link to the channel it comes from.
The thumbnails are good quality and do a great job of representing the scenes.
Playback options and the embed setup is fine: we like being able to switch qualities with a minimal number of clicks. What’s clearly missing is an archive page for performers. You can filter and find them using the sidebar, but it’s not convenient at all.
You can create playlists if you’d like – it’s an easy way for you to gather up the best scenes for convenient playback at a later date. There is a dedicated favorites area on the website too. Perhaps including a rating system and comments would be decent: most sites have them and users tend to treat them favorably.
The Mobile Experience
Navigating the platform on mobile was okay – we’re not massive fans of singular preview panes, but it works just fine – as does category selection and channel display. The biggest problem we have with the mobile website is non-fullscreen scene display when you hold your phone horizontally. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s literally the size of the video until you go ahead and switch into fullscreen. Once you do, it’s fine – but come on, this is something that should have been fixed on day one. The vertical rendering of scenes is actually bigger when you’re not in fullscreen.
Billing Information
You can choose to sign up for 2 days, 30 days or a full year. The 2-day trial is $3, 30 days is $19.99 and a full year costs you $120.
Note that the 2-day trial is allegedly limited and rebills at $39.99 instead of the standard $19.99. Inside the member’s area, you can convert to a full membership at the $19.99 rate before your trial runs out – we highly recommend you do this.
We tried to find information regarding the limited nature of Bellesa Plus’s trial, but there were no links or details provided anywhere. There might be a limit on the number of scenes you can watch, but we went through about 25 without any issues. If we find out what the limits actually are, we’ll be sure to update this section.
Subscriptions to Bellesa Plus can only be made with credit and debit cards: support is provided for Visa, Mastercard and Discover. We’d like to see them add support for PayPal and cryptocurrency.
How Will Bellesa Plus Purchases Appear on My Statement?
When we made a purchase, this is what our bank reported to us:
There’s a popular app that utilizes this name – completely unrelated to adult entertainment. We did our best to search Google as an inquisitive spouse might – no results came back after a decent amount of searching that would get any alarm bells ringing. We think it’s fair to say that Bellesa Plus’s billing is fully discreet.
Our Verdict: Porn Streaming With An Artistic Touch
Bellesa Plus puts a female-friendly artistic twist on the successful porn streaming model.
Although it does license third-party media, more of it would be really good. The archive size here is fine, but it really falls behind the competition. The thing is, a lot of the competition has low-quality DVDs from the early 2000s that no one really wants to watch anyway.
Quality over quantity is a recurring theme.
We’re skeptical of a few decisions made here, especially with Bellesa leaning heavily into the ‘ethical’ niche. We appreciate their approach to creating porn: we’re not convinced that they’re waging the correct wars regarding niches and genres. They also need a real overhaul of their billing setup.
Since the 2-day trial gives you access to a full archive of 4K originals, we’d recommend you take them up on that offer and upgrade to the monthly package if you like Bellesa’s approach to creating media. The licensed material is a fine bonus, but it’s not the main selling point.
Style and scene setup are the main attractions.
Bellesa is clearly a service targeted at women, and that is reflected in some of the content library choices. Ethics or no ethics, we’ll give it a decent thumbs up for its original content, but it could be even better with a couple of platform tweaks.
Head over to BellesaPlus.co to sample the action, and let us know what you think!
