Skins and the brief look at the zombie face

I've noticed that some skins -- particularly the more beautiful ones -- as they load there are a few seconds in which the face has this horrible zombie-like appearance... then click! the pretty face pops in.

I imagine it's due to particularly elaborate rendering, which takes time to fully appear.

I also remember, on my first day on SL, meeting a vampire (who of course wanted to bite me), and when I spoke to her up close, she had that same zombie face. It was shocking, since the rest of her outfit was well-put-together, but I assumed back then that she intentionally wanted to look scary.

Now I think that I caught her in that moment when the face isn't fully rendered.

I've taken time to change from one skin to another, and watch my face as it loads. Some skins seem to pop on right away, and others do the zombie face first.

So... am I right in thinking that some skins are simpler and load faster, thus avoiding the zombie face? Or is my experiment flawed, and all skins do that?

I have a fast computer with 3G of RAM and a fast internet connection, so I wonder whether I sometimes look like a zombie to people with slow computers and/or connections.

all skins have it and ofrcourse it depends on the quality of the skin along with the texture size

also the graphic card helps, the location your at (alot to render or not) and internet speed to download more for rendering faster

I agree the blurry face is frightening. I wish there were a way to freeze that and make a scary avatar on purpose.

I think your skin and clothes renders (or bakes as they call it) on your computer and then uploads to the servers, so usually what you see is what everyone else sees. Or sometimes they just see a plain gray non-texture.

If some load faster for you it may be because the skin textures are loaded in your texture cache and haven't gotten written over yet. Does anyone know for sure about this latter? I know building textures load in your cache but not sure about skins.

[Edit: There I go with the thing again. I'm leaving it this time. Sorry for the difficult read.]

could be your typing style, something you do so often you don't notice anymore, even if you think about it?