Welcome to week four of our 30 Days project! We’re half way done with this series and I hope you’ve been enjoying it. When I started thinking about the skins I wanted to post in the series, I picked old favorites, but I’m taking my slot this week to write about a brand new skin release by Cane Sutter called Skinthesis. In fact, the grand opening for this line was yesterday, January 25.
This brand new line is a hybrid between photorealism and hand-painted skins and I think Cane has done a great job with this release balancing the contrasts between the two approaches to skin design. She also has quite a flair of picking classic makeup combinations and doing them well across most of her skin tones. Skinthesis Mandi line comes in six tones from the aptly named Dark (a bit too orangey for my tastes), to a beautiful caramelly “Ethnic” tone (shown left in my favorite makeup from the whole line called “Assassin.”) through the ultra-goth pure white “Powder” tone on the other end of the spectrum.
And while Cane was kind enough to send me samples of every skin tone the one I liked the best was the “Fair” tone – a bit lighter than “Tan” but not quite as light as “Pale.” (Seen left. The far makeup is called Smoulder; the near makeup is called Moderne.) While I’ve enjoyed wearing these skins around the grid, I did have some issues with them too. First, depending on the shape (I tested several) the breasts can look a bit, well, square. The trend in SL is definitely toward well shaded breasts so perhaps it’s a function of the shading on these skins. The second issue is that these skins seem to have painted-on eyelashes. This can make fitting prim lashes a challenge. If you pick lashes that are thick and luscious enough they’ll hide the painted-on lashes pretty effectively, but you can still get some strange artifacts from the viewer depending on the “LOD” or level of detail that’s rendered and how well your video card does alpha layer sorting. Third, the only brow color is a beautiful dark brown – perfect if that’s your everyday hair color. If you’re a redhead or like dark black hair, you’ll want to request different brow colors from Cane.
Cane is very open to taking custom work from her clients – although she tells me that she’s been super busy with a set of orders lately. Simple requests like brow colors can be handled quickly, but if you want to request a custom makeup or tattoo placement or something like that, it could take a bit longer to fulfill that request. She’s also planning a fun line of “dress up” skins – like for example the golden hued Egyptian-themed skin she just finished last night. So far you can play with that one, plus a “Totally 80s” makeup theme called “Radical.” If you’re in the mood to try one of Cane’s skins for free, you can try your luck on her Lucky Chair which is currently loaded with an exclusive (not-for-sale) Valentine’s themed skin in all six tones.
Visit Skinthesis at Mysten (103, 97, 76). Prices for the skins are: singles 999L, 6 pack(1 makeup, 6 tones), 1600L, 8 pack (mix and match, any 8 skins), 2000L and 15 makeup packs are 3000L.
