A Skin Epifiny!

I've just this second had one of those A-Ha! moments...

I went out and got a ton of Demo skins and was checking them out tonight.I set aside the ones I really liked and groaned internally at how much this was all going to cost. I moved on to the last group and started looking. I liked some of the makeup, and the body looked pretty good, but there was something wrong...

My Avi, usually a cheerful, large Italian-looking girl was not ...happy!

I could not believe what I was seeing, so I tried on my usual skin and then another and then the one I had started with. Then it hit me! It was true. With the "new" skin demo, I looked, I don't know, worried or concerned or something. With my usual skin and with the others I had just looked at, I looked happy, pleased, un-afraid, somethiing nice.

Skins DO make you look different!

Beyond sexy or young or slutty or exotic or fresh-faced or whatever, different skins can make you look happy, sad, nervous, a lot of things.

To me, this explains (in part) why some avatars look dead, blank, empty, un-appealing while others can look just the opposite!

I am going to be looking at skins in a whole new light now!

~Jenni~

Remember that you probably created your original AV shape with one particular skin to look right. Now you're right, all skins are different, not least because they were all created and tested on av shapes different to yours. If you change skins regularly you'll probably be aware that for the best results you should have tweaked versions of your shape for each so that you can maintain your own look.

It's usually simple things such as eyebrow shape & placement. A little higher on one skin compared to another will give you that permenantly surprised look, it's not that it's an inherent fault of that skin, just that for best effect you need to tweak your eyebrows down a little to wear it and look the same.

Creating skins is not as easy as it looks, and that goes ten fold over when you're trying to make something that looks good for the huge range of AV shapes out there in SL, and all designers have their own preferences, tricks and features they like to pay particular attention to - but if you repay a small fraction of the effort that went into making it by carefully optimising your shape for any skin you try, I promise it reaps huge rewards in how good you look !

(Of course skin tone, makeup and all the other details play their part too, but are more to do with personal preference than anything else at the end of the day)

The mouth and chin area almost always has to be tweaked when you get a new skin.

Oh, yes! I recently got one of the new kid skins from Robin Sojourner, and was amazed at what a positive difference it made on my avvie - not just asethically, but visual emotion as well.

Mari