Four Faces of Lee

I recently got a new skin.  I wasn't even in the market, I was still pretty happy with my Nvious skin.  All my prim feet and other bits were color matched to it after having it for about a year.  But an old friend who hates to shop asked me to help him find a certain type of skin.  Specifically a "femboi" skin.

So I set out to find him some options.  I found many fine places to get such a skin depending on your budget and tastes.  But I found one place that did things in a manner I've never seen before in SL.  Pink Fuel is the shop's name.  They only make female skins.  But then they also sell tattoo layers that change the body of the skin from male, to small busted, (average is part of the skin), to large busted.  You can add more muscles, or leave things as they are.  The tattoos are perfectly matched to the skins and do not change the face!

This was great!  I've long wished I could get away with a smaller bust size, and with the tattoo layer I can.  But I just don't look right in a lot of my clothes without at least modest breasts.  Also, skin textures seem to look best with a small range of bust sizes.  These tattoos solve these problems.  On top of that they had an asian style skin called "Kumi" that just looked wonderful.  I tried on the demo and had to have it.  Took me a while, but I've color matched my bits (I did some of this with the demo so I would know it would work for me before I bought the skin) and gotten a couple of shape changing tattoos.  I also modified the breast size of my shape and saved them all together for ease of use.  I'm really quite happy with it.

This strikes me as another good time to show you how a skin can effect how your avatar looks.  I took shots of the skins I wore the longest over the years I've been in SL.  All with everything else, such as shape, eyes, hair, lighting, position, all the same.  So, that said, here are the four faces of Lee, from 2009 to 2013.

I have worn other skins, mostly in 2009 when I was new before settling on the Slink.  I noticed looking at this, it makes me look like I have gotten progressively darker over time.  This was not something I intended. I simply get the skin shade that appeals to me the most from each vendor.  These skins I tried early on in SL ran from much lighter to somewhat darker than all of these.  I mostly used one about the same shade as the Nvious until I got some prim feet from Slink.  I ended up buying a Slink skin because the feet I had came with pre-set color match settings for those skins.  Now, I can usually recolor something to blend very closely with my skin.  Back then, it took me months of intermittent trying to get my Slink feet to match the Laqroki skin that I already had and liked better.  Eventually I did, and I wore that skin for a very long time!

I also noticed that the new skin makes my lips thinner, I may see if modifying the face shape to make them a bit fuller works for me.  This is one of the fun things about SL for me, you can tinker endlessly working toward a certain look, or coming up with completely different looks.