Pi, anyone?

In RL people are criticized for being too thin or too fat, everyone is expected to conform to an ideal measurement of beauty. In SL, one would imagine people have the freedom to look like they want, but as it turns out, in SL people are still expected to conform to an ideal measurement of beauty. Those who are too thin or too fat are criticized, especially because in SL it’s so easy to change. You can just move some slides and have a thinner waist, larger breasts, or a Kate Moss figure. But that doesn’t mean anyone want that or are obliged to want that.

But that’s not all, there’s something more. The same way people are expected to conform to an ideal measurement of beauty in SL, those who do are criticized for doing so. So you can’t either be thin, fat nor can you look too beautiful - you will be accused of something. The fact is that you cannot please everybody.

But there are some things you CAN (and should) do. The most important one, body proportion! It doesn’t matter if you’re fat or slim, every human body in RL follows rules of proportion in nature. Have you ever heard of Pi?

The length of your arms and legs, the length of your torso, the size of your head, everything follows a proportion. It would be great if the SL appearance editor could preserve these proportions, such that if you made your legs longer, the rest of the body would change to PRESERVE the Pi proportion (but instead, if you make longer legs your torso will became very small).

But the editor cannot be preserve proportions, because it has to give you the freedom to create non-human avatars, and let’s say, even human-like avs like fairies might need to differ from the proportions (I don’t know about fairies, maybe they have longer legs, this is just an example).

So as it turns out, keeping with the harmony of body proportions is up to the user.

Which in some cases is unfortunate, as you can see from this picture on the right.

I don't know what leads some people to such extremes...

Does it look as if as the picture had been stretched? But it hasn't. She really looked like this. And she has been in SL since April. Really! I don't know what's worse, the long spider legs or the really short torso. Her crotch is where the stomach should be, and there isn't much space left for vital organs, but since in SL you don't have to eat, maybe she felt all she needed was legs and boobs.

Take a look at the mirror in RL and check how long your arms are in comparison to the body. Are your avatar’s arms as long? Try making them a little longer so that they would look like human arms. Doesn’t it look better?

I have one complaint about the Appearance editor (actually, more than one, but this one is important): the height slider should tell your height in both meters and feet. Otherwise, lots of girls set their height to 100, which makes them more than 2 meters tall, making the rest of us look like midgets. My height is set as 56, which means I’m 1,74 meters tall (or 5.7 feet), which is a normal height for a girl, but most of the female avatars I see in SL seem to tower over me. Why are there so many giants? If the Appearance editor would tell your height in RL measurements instead of the absurd 0 – 100 scale, people would know how to use it. Apparently this feature has already been requested and put to vote last October. The amazing thing is that only 15 people have voted in favor of that. See proposition 2133. And please vote!

You can check how tall you are using a height detector. If you don’t have one, you can use one at a store. For instance, Free Dove has one if I still remember correctly.


Body Proportion, part II
(read it later if you’re already tired at this point!)

When talking about female proportion, one thing comes to mind: the proportion between hips and boobage. The thing is, in SL people expect them to be fully proportionate. But as it happens in Real Life, they usually aren’t. Top models are the ones who are expected to have them perfectly proportionate, and as it turns out... most women cannot be top models! Usually the hips are larger than the breasts. So if you want to have a realistic shaped avatar, your hips should be as wide as the bust or a little wider. A nice round ass is beautiful, don’t be afraid to have an ass ;-) but try not to fill your screen with it, LOL! Of course you have the freedom to fill your screen with your ass, but you will be the one staring at it...

Some other day I saw a woman with huge prim breasts; at the beginning I didn’t even realize those WERE breasts. I wanted to talk to her, but I felt intimidated by the size of those things, really, I cannot stress enough how huge they were. In real life they would weigh 20 kg, each! I thought it was a joke, or a protest. But later I found her blog and read it, and I saw it wasn’t a protest, she has enormous breasts because she likes it. And while I can’t think why, why would someone like so enormous breasts, it’s her choice, it makes her happy. She likes it, she can, she has it. Why not? People should have the freedom. But I’m happy she’s the only one I have seen with those breasts because they SCARE me! If it became fashionable and everybody started using them it would be a nightmare. One woman with 20 kg breasts it’s ok, but 20 women with 20 kg breast, that would be spooky.

Lips! This was mentioned before, and Orchid also wrote about it at Mean Girls Guide to SL (see the post Good Looks are a Slider Away, I recommend it if the subject of body proportions interests you). As she states, lips are usually too large in most female avatars. I don’t think most of them have huge lips, but some do. Most of the time the problem is that the makeup of the skin has large lips and it isn’t possible to change them.

Take the Lovey’s skins for instance. The lips are rather big, but still beautiful in my opinion. I myself would prefer them smaller but you can’t change them. But the skin is beautiful, the face is really pretty. I know Vogue skins are made differently, such that you can tweak your lips and make them smaller, but what if you don’t like the eyebrows? What if you don’t like the other details on those skins? It’s quite hard to find a skin that would please someone completely.

I think so much has been said about body proportion on so many blogs, so I will end this post here. I hope the things I said about height and body proportion could be of some help, but I’m afraid the people who read this blog are not the ones who need the advice. LL should include this kind of help in their tutorials at the Orientation Island. If only the Appearance menu would show the height in meters and feet, that would be an enormous help.