Styling your Secondlife with Firehorse

This week we are going to explore something a little different. We are going to make a female avatar, with skin, AO and wardrobe, for L$500. But to make life a little more interesting we are going to get everything we need from www.onrez.com – just to see if it can be done.
First you will need to register, so go to the site and follow the sign up instructions, then hop inworld, go to onrez island and touch one of their boards so it knows who you are, here you will be give an onrez wallet which you put your lindens into – those lindens are now only available to you for use on the onrez site.
Now shopping this way has obvious advantages, not least of which being some designers sell of special items and clearance items either very cheaply or free. You can also get things which aren’t available inworld.
BUT – and here are the downsides, it can be very hard to tell exactly what you are buying, not every designer bothers putting a picture up and as we all know, with the aid of photoshop, the camera can lie.
First I started with the skin, it was tempting to go for the pixels spa skins that are on special offer – L$50 for a two option skin pack with a beautifully detailed face and skin tone, has got to be good, even if the body detail is a little lacking, but I felt this would be almost cheating, I know what I’d be getting, I have some pixel spa skins – so – I reluctantly passed those by and kept browsing. In the end I went for a Frick retro skin – a bargain for only L$10!
Next for the AO, this was slightly more difficult, because lets face it, a new walk is great but we spend a lot of time standing around and it’s nice to have a ladylike standing pose. The AO choices for L$100 or less was somewhat limited and I decided that really, a submissive AO isn’t for me, no matter how cheap it is so I opted for a *SHJL* AO for L$100.
Next hair..now hair is not something I would usually risk buying without demoing first, at least not without knowing the designer, and it has to be said on onrez there is a collection of ETD hair for under L$100 which are lovely and reliable, but this is an exercise in risk taking so, I jumped in blind and bought a fancy bun in blood red from Mae Best, it was L$10 so not a huge risk.
Now the body is sorted, and yes, I didn’t buy a shape, because my own shape is based on a readily available freebie that has had a certain amount of tweaking, yes I had a friend to help with that (great fun – standing naked with her shouting “Up a bit, no too far, down a bit”) but if I can do it anyone can.
Time for the fun stuff, I decided that a lady should have one casual out fit and one formal and of course SHOES! Have I mentioned I am a bit of a shoe addict??
No shortage of choice, in fact choice is a bit overwhelming but in the end I opted for an evening gown called 39 Goddess by Lovely Ackman for L$20 and GsBB system dress February by Gumi Yao (this series of outfits is designed to be mixed with each other) for L$75.
Shoe wise I played relatively safe – for most of this article I’ve tried to go for lesser known names but after over 100 pages of shoes which looked to be of very varying quality I opted for the simply sexy heels by Simone! L$150 with and without walk.
Now for the results, the Frick skin is excellent, one heavy-ish make up (unfortunately for me this was the only option with freckles) and one more elegant make up – body detail is acceptable – but that depends on how important it is to you – if you want to look stunning naked this may not be the skin for you but it is perfectly acceptable for a low cut dress and the skin has an almost china doll like translucence . Added bonus with the skin, which I didn’t realise when I bought it, it comes with a shape – so bouquets all around for the Frick skin.
The hair was slightly disappointing but for the price it is more than acceptable and the basic design is good.
The AO is fine , I have paid a lot more money for worse AO’s and this has some nice poses.
The formal evening dress has lovely textures (and gained me compliments when I wore it out and about). It also comes with earrings and armbands – the only thing I didn’t like was the scarf which looked big and bulky on the neck.
The GsBB dress is lovely – not only is it already a new favourite for me but I will be investing in the others in the series, it’s well made and sits well on the body.
The shoes are, of course, lovely, very classy and surprisingly high quality for the price.
So for a total spend of L$365 you can be all set to venture into SL – and lets face it a good week collecting from the money trees for the newbies or a good week camping or earning tips for the rest of us and you are all set . With the added advantage you can do it all without having to tp across the grid, worrying about being Ruthed or losing landmarks.