Men's Second Style

I’m an idealist.

Real life clothes have wrinkles, real life hair has tangles, real life skin has bumps and pimples and pores that nothing can shrink. And many designers in Second Life are focused on making their creations as true to life as possible, recreating all these problems in the name of realism.

I say forget that! I want skin smooth as glass, hair that always looks good, clothes that never need ironing. If I could be an anime character, I would. (Preferably Riki.) I’ll never get that in real life, but in Second Life, all it takes is a good artist and some lindens!

The Renovar line of skins by Draconic Lioncourt sparked this realization. When I tried them on, I found what I’d been missing with all the photorealistic skins I’ve gone through. Drac’s skins are primarily hand-drawn, with photosourced accents, and are smudged and smoothed to a degree unachievable without movie-star level makeup. The body is shaded in all the right places, including elbows and knees, with shadows that suggest dimensionality without being ridiculously deep, and highlights that aren’t too shiny. I like my body to be lithe and smooth, and this is the first skin I’ve found that doesn’t force me to look like I do a thousand situps every morning.

The face is the make-or-break part of the skin. I’ll put up with muscular hypertrophy as long as the face is good, but a facial problem can’t be overlooked. The most common problems are eyebrows, lips, and girliness. Some faces give me a unibrow. Others have every single eyebrow hair delineated. Lips range from invisible to waaaay too dark. And girliness… well, I can’t help laughing when I see a big triangle-torso guy with a face that looks like it belongs on a teenage girl. Adding stubble or even a beard doesn’t help these faces.

This skin satisfies all my facial strictures. The eyebrows are thick enough to be masculine, plus I love the sardonic swoop. No unibrow, thank God! I may not pluck my eyebrows, but a guy can only handle so much hair up there. The lips are a little pink on the Porcelain skin (right), but not lipsticky-looking. And don’t ask me how, but the face is angelic, yet all male.

The three shades here are Cream, Antique, and Porcelain. Almond and Cappucino are also available. Four facial hairs are offered in addition to clean-shaven. Each single retails at L$800; there are no packs. Special bonus: two matching genitalia options are included, making this one hell of a deal. Draconic Kiss is located in Koreshan 193, 92, 24.