Obligatory Hair Fair 2014 Post! Part One

Yesterday, Persephone Paine of Dressing In Pixels and I fought our way into Hair Fair. We rode the little "prim bus" around and I drove because I'm bossy cool because that's my favourite part of Hair Fair each year. Other than the hair.

And such hair I got.

We got around two of the four sims before our funds/energy ran out. But I still got enough hair to span many, many blog posts.

Here are some of them, in roughly alphabetical order!

(Above)

Saltgrass - Denize: I was fortunate enough to receive this as a review copy. Saltgrass, a relative newcomer, offers a huge amount of really nicely-done textures in each HUD-controlled style, I believe they're definitely a brand to keep an eye on. Denize is a lush side-parted layered style, casually tossed over one shoulder, with a few flyaways and a nice wave to it. 

Argrace - Minami: I have a hat like this in RL! In fact, I'm wearing it in my RL pic in my inworld profile! It doesn't say Argrace on it though. And my hair wasn't red when that picture was taken. But other than that. It's totally like me! Woo yay!

Argrace - Kanade: A companion style to Minami, this has a super-adorable little braid over the shoulder, and cute little wavies around the face. I didn't used to be able to wear Argrace hair because they didn't have a red that suited me, so I'm incredibly glad this has changed in recent years, their hat-hair in particular can't be beat. And, a dragon is wearing my RL cowboy hat now. So I needed this.

Saltgrass - Raleigh: Another luxuriously thick wavy style from Saltgrass, this one is centre parted and takes especially well to the on-trend ombre textures we're seeing so much of lately.

(Below)

Atomic - Darling: I don't remember seeing this one in the Demo group, this was my first unplanned purchase. A very youthful mid-length style, Darling includes a rigged and unrigged version, and the dainty bow is texture change in a range of colours. Atomic's reds pack is a little more Natural than I would normally wear, but has a very wide range of shades in it, ranging from a pale strawberry blonde to a very deep mahogany, though, so that's cool.

Olive - Alice: On the other end of the scale, Olive, whose reds in my preferred pack (Pack 2) are very very bright. And I like that! But I'll probably tint these a light grey to tone them down for everyday wear. I love the placement of the bangs on Alice, the style frames my face beautifully, and the locks of hair themselves have a nice wave to them.

Olive - Anna: This is one of the few very long styles in SL that doesn't look kind of silly. The way the hair falls and lightly tangles is gorgeous. Until about 6 months ago, my hair RL was about this long, buuuut, it did not look as pretty at this. 

Olive - Crystal: A wavy midlength thingy. A very very very long time ago in SL, I had a style from Naughty that was like this and I loved it with all my heart. I have a total weakness for longish wavy styles with a centre parting like this. As a sidenote: I want to wear ALL of Olive's textures, alllll the time. They're such fresh, beautiful colours. 

A long response about hips

This post started out as a reply to a comment made on Google+ about this post, essentially wondering "What's the deal with the shattered pelvis look in Second Life?".

That response ran SUPERLONG, as evidenced below, and so I decided to make it into a blog post. You're all so welcome.

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Well, while I can't speak for the more extreme and deliberate examples, I can theorize that there's a number of reasons why it's showing up more lately.

Firstly, real-life trends. The mainstream fashion of the last few years has tended to accentuate not just the hips, but the entire upper-abdomen, with high waistlines and fitted styles around the hips, with a lesser emphasis on the chest (these trends are echoing the late 80s/early 90s, which in turn were inspired by the late 40s-mid50s, because fashion will cycle like that, usually as an adaptation of the current young generation's parents' young fashion).
Secondly, there lately is a greater degree of body acceptance in women, and a rise of curvier women in the media. Kim Kardashian's popularity is an obvious example of this, but likewise the rise in prominence of South American aesthetics has risen through latin women, and the natural body shapes of many black women coupled with this are all contributing factors to the fact that currently, womanly curves are in, even for us pale girls.

Now, Second Life mirrors and expands on real world trends in many ways, but it also has the ability to exaggerate those trends, which is a partial explanation for what you might see in the fashion postings lately, but it's not the full story.
The other part of it is the limitations of the Second Life avatar mesh itself, which is highly outdated, having been in use since Second Life's first days, 11 years ago. The designers of that mesh could not have hoped to foresee the visual advances content creators have made in that time.
The limitations in shapemaking with regard to the current trends are as follows: Simply adding weight ("Fat") to the avatar leads to highly undesirable results, dramatically altering the look of the face, and bypassing the concept of curves, and running straight to what I would describe as stoutness. So to achieve the "curvy" effect, we need to use some of the other sliders at our disposal.
The "Saddlebags" slider is useful but unglamourously named and comes with its own limitations, which I will come to later. Which leaves us with the "Hip Width" slider. The Hip Width slider works by setting the legs further apart on the avatar skeleton, rather than adding extra flesh. On a normal human woman, this would be balanced by bigger thighs, but of course each body part is treated more or less separately, so changing the hips has no effect on the legs. Sadly, there's no leg fat slider, only "Leg Muscle", which has a very small range of usablilty, between famine-victim thin with knobbly knees, and weird square balloons. So most women have little choice but to keep their legs between around 30 and 60 points, which does not fit nicely on the broad hips required for the desired silhouette.

In traditional proportion, a woman's pelvis is supposed to correspond roughly to the width of her shoulders, approximately the same or wider. For an hourglass shape then, with the top half of the figure being about the same as the bottom, with a slim waist, to have the avatar's thigh's touching as with a human woman, the absolute smallest the Hip Width can be is around 30 points. That's with the shoulders at 0, and the legs at the thinnest they can be before they deform. And it looks bad. So the broader the shoulders, the broader the hips need to be, and the broader the hips are, the bigger the gap, and not everyone wants to be a twig. This issue is exacerbated even further when you try for the currently-fashionable Pear Shape, which I personally tend towards.

So initially these were just the constraints we needed to work within to achieve a curvy figure, but as with many things, it became adopted and embraced as a stylized preference in Second Life, just like the ultra-frowny mouth, and tiny-tiny hands. To whit, designers of mesh clothing will often essentially build this trait in to their clothing, so that even those with an "ideal" shape end up with thinner, further-apart legs than their avatar's true shape. Previously I mentioned the Saddlebags slider. Previously this was the best way to add extra size to hips, however, with standard rigged-mesh clothing, this slider was not taken into account, and so Saddlebags needed to be taken down to accommodate many clothings waistlines. Now Fitted Mesh is on the scene, things are not much improved, since from what I can tell as a non-creator, the Saddlebag area is considered as much a "bone" as anything else, and becomes incredibly exaggerated accordingly (as was the case in my original post's photo, plus the "built-in gap" the pants already had).

Though there are numerous other factors I could touch on, including the influences of certain styles of comic-book and anime artwork, and male expectations of the female shape (for instance, the importance of the "box gap"), these are the main technical/societal factors in the matter as I, a non-expert, see them.

Apologies for the long and rambling nature of this post, I am not an essayist by nature, but since it was asked, I figured I would give it my best shot as a proper answer.

Credits: 

Hair: Saltgrass - Lancy - Reds

Top: Schadenfreude - Skelebeater - White Noir

Knickers: Sakide - Slide Panties - Dino

Shoes type wotsits: Noodles - Harmony Peace Foot Rope - Gold

Makeup:

Nails: Action - Nouveau

LotD180614

Credits:

Hair: Saltgrass - Lancy - Reds

Dress: Overhigh - Candy Sky - Original (at TDR Collection 40)

Jacket: Sakide - Denim Loose Jacket (flared) - Blue

Shoes: Fri.day - Wayfaring Sandals - Black (at June 2014 Collabor88)

Necklace: Yummy - Ball Chain Necklace - Happy Face

Cigarette: Bloody Mess - Lousy Rolled Cigarette 

Makeup:

Eyes: Random Matter - Aislinn Shadows V1 - Peasey

Lips: Angelica - Your Lip Gloss - #3 Cherry

Nails: ZOZ - Foil Tips Spring

Tattoos (upper):  Leti's Tattoos - Goddess of Flowers - 50%

Tattoo (leg): silentsparrow - Wing-ed Hearts Vintage Tattoo

lotd160614

Credits:

Hair: Saltgrass - Adelaide - Reds
Top: Fashionably Dead - Crop Top - Tribal Pattern 6
Shorts: [In]sight - Plaid Pocket Shorts
Boots: LavandaChic - Comic Style Boots - Yellow
Hat: Schadenfreude - Angsa Straw Hat - Ribbon
Bag o' Pig: Schadenfreude - This Little Piggie Wiggie Went to Market (Arcade June 2014)
Makeup:
Eyes: Fashionably Dead - Sedgwick Makeup (eyes only)
Lips: Nomine - Magpie Lipstick - Lipstain Coral
Nails: Bella Elephante - Cruel Summer