Editing Appearance Doesn't Produce Favourable Results

When editing my appearance, the editor produces no or unfavourable results. Clothes do not change when editing, skin colour, etc. When editing my avatar's hair, it still has that ugly sideways mock comb-over, while adding other hair styles on top of it, creating a very ugly "do" indeed.

How do I do this correctly?

I'd start with clearing your cache, turning your entire system, router, modem, computer, etc. off, and find something called "bald cap" or similar baldness named hair and wear that when wearing prim attachment hair.

A lot of prim hair comes with a bald hair texture to use with it.

I don't know what this 'prim' hair you're speaking of is. I just started this avatar.

I didn't notice you are so new.

I interpreted "it still has that ugly sideways mock comb-over, while adding other hair styles on top of it" as meaning you were attaching "prim" hair over top of the old fashioned texture based hair that is a texture applied to your avatar mesh.

Prims are the basic building blocks of objects in SL, the boxes, spheres, and so on that make up the world of SL. Prims can be attached to avatar body parts. The prims that are attached to body parts are called attachments. Properly formed prims can be attached to the head to serve as hair.

I suggest you watch the tutorial videos in the wiki and join the New Citizen's and use the group chat there to ask questions in-world, as well as dropping by the New Citizen's headquarters when you have nothing better going on, and checking for classes on the many different things one needs to know to do SL right.

It's possible you have a problem for which some more information about your system would be useful.

I think secondlife://Kuula/135/224 is the link for the New Citizen's main build, and the url for the tutorials is http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorials .