« London skirts at DMC | Home | Edgy Sexy Chic…. Truth Has A New Shop »
Canimal skins: Glamour vs. Fetish
By Celebrity Trollop | May 23, 2007
In the style of my earlier Vogue vs. Charmed post which compared skins from Celestial Studios, here’s another post which compares older skin (Fetish) with the newest skin (Glamour) from Canimal Zephyr.
I’ve long been a fan of Canimal’s skins. In fact, one of my earliest essays was an enthusiastic review of Canimal’s Suicide Girls tattoos overlaid on her Fetish skins. (Skins which I still adore and wear from time to time.) Canimal’s new skin, Glamour was released almost simultaneously with the Vogue skins back in January of 2007 and I was eager to check them out and take them for a spin. One issue that cropped up right away was that I couldn’t find a way to adjust my shape to make the skins look really fantastic. So they languished in my inventory for a long time.
About 4 weeks ago, I went to shape expert Haver Cole of Lemon and asked her to come up with a shape for Glamour that would really showcase the skin so I could finally finish this article. (You’ve already seen the shape if you looked at the prim eyelash tutorial I made last month.) She really did a great job. And as with my other skin reviews, please assume that shadows and strange artifacts in the photos are products of my photograph and lighting choices, not inherent flaws in the skin itself.
I wanted to show one of the most recent new makeup packs for Glamour integrated in an outfit. After all, most of us do not spend our Second Lives wandering around the grid naked. So I headed to Saijo City, used the Tartan Red outfit from BareRose (which Canimal herself wore on the cover for Second Style #4) and snapped the photo to the left. I think it illustrates one of the strengths of Canimal’s skins — and that is the happy experimentation with makeup styles and colors. That’s one of the best things about shopping at Canimal in general — she has a fun, adventurous eye for style, and doesn’t like to keep cranking out the same sort of outfits week after week.
(More text and the potentially NSFW image behind the cut)
To the left is a composite of both skins side by side with identical detail areas for each skin to aid in making your own comparisons between these two skin lines. Both shapes in these photos are identical, both hair selections are the same, and I’m using the same set of prim lashes for each skin.
There’s two major differences between these two skins — aside from what I consider to be the generally improved body detailing and shading on the Glamour side (compare Glamour’s elbows to Fetish, for example.)
The first major difference between Glamour and Fetish is the shading around the breasts. The Fetish skins have defined but softer shading especially on the top of the breasts where Glamour really adds quite a bit of shadow here. This change gives amazing looking cleavage fully clothed, but naked more closely resembles breast implants. Not that there’s anything wrong with implants per se — in fact, I’m sure that some readers might want that kind of effect for their avatar. It is a striking, dramatic difference between the skins. One other item that struck both Haver and myself as I was working on the photography for this post was the mapping of the upper torso area of the skins to the avatar mesh seemed to be visibly bigger on Glamour.
In other words, on identical shapes with identical breast size settings, the Glamour skin adds an optical illusion of bigger size. (And that may be a plus (heh) or minus depending on your personal tastes.)
The second major difference between the skins is the positioning of the eyebrows. If you take a look at the makeup detail headshots for each skin, it’s easy to see that the Fetish skins have brows which are positioned on the skin several pixels higher than on Glamour. The lower brow line of Glamour was the barrier for my shape to making that skin look great without adjustment (or a different shape all together.) It could be conditioning at work though; most skins in Second Life tend to have a higher brow line than Glamour and perhaps for that reason I had grown accustomed to expecting that look.
Other changes are evident — the abs and tummy were reworked in Glamour, and it looks like Canimal decided to soften the shading around the collarbones and enhance the articulation of the toes on the feet. Happily, many of the most popular Fetish makeup sets have been revamped and brought back for the Glamour line so you can choose which skin you prefer, rather than having to choose between a skin and its associated makeup.
Both Fetish and Glamour skins are available for purchase on the Canimal sim, one of the four members of The Quad, a fashion shopping power district, consisting of top content creators Dazzle, Celestial Studios, Canimal and ETD.
Seen in world: Yes
Review copies: Yes
Friends list: No
Lemon shapes are available for purchase in Imogen. (See Haver Cole’s picks for a specific LM to her store.)
a question you knew that was coming - what outfit are you wearing in the pic, stockings dress etc? Thanks and SO sorry to bother asking you.
Posted by: Kristine Deadlight on May 23rd, 2007 at 4:57 pmIt’s Tartan Red by BareRose.
Boots are by Dark Eden.
Posted by: Celebrity Trollop on May 23rd, 2007 at 5:02 pmYou missed a huge one, Celeb. Lip Shape! No matter what I do to my lips, I can’t make the Glamour lip-shape look right on me, but the Fetish lips always look great. The Fetish lips were fuller in the bottom, but the Glamour bottom lip is very squared off in comparison, like Adam’n'Eve’s skins, or Tuli’s skins.
Posted by: Iris Ophelia on May 23rd, 2007 at 7:36 pm