Gloss on lips???

I am attempting to make a skin. How do I make the lipstick have a certain gloss to it?? Any help greatly appreciated.

It's all texturing tricks. You paint it as if it were on a set of real, 3D, glossy lips, using light colors for the highlights and darker ones for the shadows. Look at some photos of the kind of lipstick you want to get an idea of what to put where.

The secret is to make it subtle, but not too subtle. If the highlights are too thick and white, it will look like chalk, not highlights. If they aren't light enough, the effect will be completely missed unless someone zooms in really closely on another's face.

The best trick I can give you is to paint them, and then make a New document with a Merged Copy of the face, and reduce the whole face map to around 100x100 pixels, which makes the face roughly the size people will see it in SL. Does it still look like glossy lips?

If they look good at both full size, which people will see when they zoom in on your face, and the reduced size, then you've got it.

Wouldn't the Plastic Wrap filter possibly help achieve a glossy look?

I suppose you could use it. I wouldn't, though, because the highlights it adds aren't the ones you'd find on real lips.

For instance, it puts one between the lips, where it should be dark, since that part is folded inside the mouth. This would look really odd when someone smiles. In my experiment just now, it also put an inverted crescent highlight on the bottom lip that would just plain look out of place. It would give the illusion that the lips had two points that stuck out on the bottom.

If people do decide to use it, I'd use it on a duplicate Mouth layer, and erase (or mask) the portions that don't look right. Then I'd change the Opacity, because the highlights are really very "hot."

IMHO, it would be faster to just use a soft brush, and add them by hand.