Hair

Is hair a part of a skin or a separate item. I have been trying to change my hair style by adding new hair, but I can't get rid of old hair. Sometimes I do manage to but I can't change the hair in the change appearance dialog box.

Can somebody explain hair?

There are several different ways to have hair. Changing your hair depends on what kind you already have.

The most common type is prim hair - that is hair that someone has built. It is usually attached to an attachment point on the head. Buying another hair style or picking up another freebie hair style usually replaces the old when it is worn. This type of hair cannot be changed with the sliders as it's more like a wig than part of your avatar. Many of these come with a bald cap which I think disguises the built in avatar hair (and can also change the eyebrow shape a little bit for some reason).

The other type is the hair that is made with the sliders in appearance mode. This is actually a part of the basic avatar and I'm not sure it can be entirely detached. Setting every slider to 0 or wearing a bald cap usually gets rid of it when you want to wear prim hair - which most people do. [Edit - but if you want to play with this type of hair, you'll have to detach any prim hair you may have. Put the cursor over the hair, right click and select "Detach." The hair disappears, but don't worry. It's in your inventory somewhere if you want it back.]

The third type of hair I can think of is hair that is already drawn onto the skin. Skins are textures painted over your avatar shape. Painted on hair is usually really short - like a Marine's hair cut. The only way to be sure of removing this type is to get a different skin, though you can somewhat hide it with prim hair, especially if the prim hair is the same color as the painted on hair.

There will be more posts to clarify what I've clumsily said, I'm sure - so read on.

And have fun.

You prolly need to wear a bald base. Th ebald base wil come with a hair you purchase. Buy a decent skin - it's gonna cost ya. Then go to a suave and sexy hair store and plonk down some dollar sfor several hair styles. I dont think we can promote stores here but there are plenty of them around. You can hooked on hair in sl. Try Body Politik (Kin) just to get you started. But get a decent skin first. Go for mid-range price (800 to 1200ls). Wouldnt bother with a shape. Build your own.

Just to add: in your inventory, the hair that can be edited with sliders ("system hair" will have a brown wig icon. This hair is "worn", and can only be replaced by other types of system hair or a bald cap. A bald cap will have the same icon as system hair as it is basically the same thing only with a transparent texture, I believe. The prim hair has the icon of any object (yellow box) and is attached/detached from inventory. You can take it off without replacing it with a different one.

If you don't have money to shop for yet, take a look in your inventory folder. Under "clothes" you find all the basic Linden avatars, in each their folders and several of these have prim hair styles that you could try on, maybe one of them will do for now.

To remove the default hair you avatar has on ( the hair you had on when you first came to SL) You will need to wear a bald base, then to attach new prim hair ( hair that is flexiable) right click the prim hair in your inventory then click wear, and thats it.

Note: it is not nessesary to wear crappy freebies or even spend 1k on new skin, or even spend 300 on hair. Just join a freebie group and they will direct you to places to get the best high quality freebies ( that are not ripp offs)

To complicate matters a bit - there is a third sort of hair that's not an attachment or system hair made on the appearance sliders.

I mean painted-on hair that is part of the skin/tattoo texture layer. Usually this is used for very short stubbly mens' hair, of for tightly drawn-back womens' hair in conjunction with a ponytail or bun attachment.

My own tied-back hair is done with a 'system' main hair base, to give it a bit of depth, plus attached ponytail, bun or plaits.

Just to throw a tiny bit more confusion into the matter...

Most "prim hair" - the kind that has a box next to it in inventory, that you attach over a bald cap or hair base - is attached to your head. It's kind of the default hair attachment point, everyone attaches hair there, everyone (now*) attaches hats and such to different parts of the face to avoid displacing it. But when my alt was going through freebies in her early days, she found a few hairstyles that attached to her nose.

So if both are prim hairstyles, and one won't displace the other, you may have to detach one manually either by right-clicking and selecting Detach or by finding it in your inventory and detaching it there.

You can also find where things are attached by looking at them in your inventory. And you can search your inventory by typing "worn" in the search box and look at everything you're wearing in one fell swoop.

It's most likely you're trying to wear prim hair over system hair, though, as posters above have already covered.


* It used to be that most people wore system hair, and some older freebie hats will attach to the head, leaving you bald if you happen to be wearing prim hair. Disconcerting the first time you encounter it.

What everybody else said about hair... but I would also like to add that if you haven't had much experience shopping in SL, it would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the basics. The bald base is important, learn how to mod it because it controls the shape of your eyebrows as well.

An excellent resource for free & fashionable items can be found at the Free*Style blog (also an in-world group, free to join). http://slfreestyle.blogspot.com/

And you can't live on freebies alone, it gets boring! Try some of my favorite hair shops...

- ETD (tons of $1L hair for new players)
- Armidi (expensive but its amazing
- DETOUR (cute styles)
- Kin hair by Kin Keiko (Sooo cute, best bangs ever)
- Frangipani Designs (some dollarbies, also having a sale..)
- Maitreya hair (great textures and cheap fatpack)
- W&Y hair by Yukitan Farrjones (cute styes & cheap)

There's soooo many good hair shops on the grid, I am going to stop here since I don't want to hijack this thread I write a fashion blog if you want to read about all the fabulous shopping in SL (http://www.juicybomb.com) and if you want to go totally broke, please read Fashoin Planet!! (http://fashionplanet.worldofsl.com) aka the "fashion feed".

to get rid of default hair you don't need to wear a bald base ...

you just take the sliders all the way down to bald.

But.. the 'bald base' is also what you would have to save in the Appearance menu in order to wear. I suppose it's called a bald base because we pull all the sliders to 0 to wear under prim hair, but you can name it anything that makes sense. For example, I make a bald base for every skin that I wear because I customize my brows for each skin, so I have dozens of bald bases (ie, Gala Skin Brows, Minnu Skin Brows, etc.) Brows/Baldbase/Hair... = same thing

Right. We think of a "bald base" as an object, but it's really not. It's a particular set of settings of the Hair sliders in the Appearance menu. That part of the Appearance menu also controls eyebrows, which is why we associate baldies with eyebrow settings as well.

About those attachment points: Most prim hair attaches to the head, but some styles have separate bangs, which attach to the nose. You can free up that second attachment point by combining the hair and the bangs into one object, but it takes a lot of work.

Here's the basic procedure.

1. Make a copy of the hair and bang objects in your inventory, for safety.
2. Wear the hair and the bangs. If needed, edit them so that they fit nicely.
3. Make a copy of the edited objects.
4. Stand on a pose stand.
5. Rez the copy of the hair on the ground.
6. Edit it into place on your head so that it matches the hair you are wearing. It's not attached to you, it's just overlaying the hair that IS attached.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for the bangs.
8. Select the edited bangs, then select the edited hair. Go to Tools/Link to combibne them into a single object.
9. Take the combined hair back into inventory, and give it a new name, like "hairWithBangs", or "WearMe" or something.
10. Wear the new hair. You may have to re-edit it into position after it's riding on the head attach point.

Whew! Now you can put your eyelashes or sunglasses back on.

Bald is beautiful.

Telly

Some designers offer coupons for free hair and fashions for newbies. Take advantage of that. You'll get a few nice things to wear (that aren't the same freebies everyone else has) and find out who makes things to your taste. Gurl6 offers a free hair coupon, for example. There are also free hairs ( and clothes) available at places like freedove and NCI.

If you can get a couple of lindens together - shake a few money trees or put some money in the system - you'll find even more great offers in $1L boxes. Almost every good designer has something for a $1L. You can also get a lot of nice things at the Gnubie store (most $1L each).

Have fun!

Grab one of Lucrezia Lamont's New Resident Kits - several coupons in there for GREAT free hair from several big name designers.

The kit can be found on Lucrezia's property (look up her name under SEARCH - PEOPLE). If you can't get it that way - send an IM to me in world or here and I'll send a copy your way.