Are you Skinsperienced?

Skins, shapes, inventory, textures....

It's enough to make a poor girl escape the perfect virtuality of Second Life and go hide in her RL closet.

Thought I was clever enough that I could escape the newbie pitfalls, to fake my way straight past the newbie screwups.

But the newbie demon got me... I had a major disaster.

Let's go back a few days. Me, in my tweaked out but still freebie looking skin, camping in a casino chair, reading about this and that aspect of SL detailia while earning a few bucks...

Looked over and saw a most stunning creature sitting two seats down. Blonde, finely featured, slim, perfectly formed and dressed... Ahhh... my poor newbie heart broke, it was so overcome by admiration and envy. I had decided that I was buying prim hair that day, and was feeling adventurous, so I IMed her , smiled, and asked her where she'd found her perfect, blonde layers...

Sweetness and light IMed back shyly and smilingly... a precious and generous lady from Netherlands... Her english was a little rough, which gave me time to hid my newbie awkwardness with the SL interface...

I told her she was beautiful...

She gave me a skin...

The most beautiful skin.. It was smooth, highlighted, athletic, painted with an artist's brush... I was beside myself with happiness..

Safir, you are a goddess ... Thank-you. Your skin changed my SLife.

We stopped "champing" as she called it, and went on a shopping rampage... SL Joy for Girls... What fun! She bought a gorgeous ivory blonde updo and I got my Vanessa set, with two shades of red... singing "I feel pretty, oh so pretty..." I finally had prim hair and on top af that a fantastic lovely skin.. SLife was good.

Flash forward four days

It is late... I'm still wondering about a comment from a friend who wondered why the nips on my Safir skin weren't visible.. It is true, they didn't have a lot of color...I was given a tattoo of dark pink nipples.

I decided to get creative and put the lovely pink nipples on my lovely skin.

Sleepy, careless, even though the tattoo took away the colour and texture of my torso, I clicked save...not save as....but SAVE... And in that brief instant, MY TRAGEDY occurred.

My skin, once so fine, smooth and pale nippled, was now wearing a hideous pale pink t-shirt of ugliness, planted defiantly with two dark pink nips. I wept.

Frantically searched... nothing in inventory; no copies, no backups, not one other really decent skin... The thought of putting that ugly tweaked out newbie freebie skin made me want to fall on my sword.

My friend Cam IMed me, and I made my confession... It was bad. He was so sweet and helpful, but it was becoming clear that I had made a permanent blunder. Rather than go back to the newbie skin, which I finally agreed to let him see me in, he and I agreed that the best course of action was to spend all my time in long turtlenecked tops with gloves. Just keep the broken torso hidden until a new decent skin could be aquired. I began creating the ensembles and turning them out into my inventory....

It turned out that friends in SL came to the rescue and I was able to upgrade to a lovely new first rate and rather expensive skin. Thank you friend, you know who you are. My faith in virtual humanity bolstered , I celebrated.

I think I will box up my turtleneck/glove combos and present them to any lady who appears to have broken her skin. Not everyone is as blessed with generous friends as I am. So I will pass the generosity along, whenever I can...

Skins are a complicated business, but they are absolute necessity and the basis of a female in SL. And I am still a newbie, but I'm learning. Till next time then....