Do you really need to spend upwards of £40-50 just to have a Second Life avatar you're not embarrassed to be seen out in?

How much do you think my avatar cost to put together?

I often see people discussing how much you need to spend to have a decent looking avatar and am shocked.

Firstly because the cost involved is incredible and secondly because, well to be honest I think much, much cheaper alternatives are excellent.

I mostly wear LiViD's clothes (the Wednesday dress in the image above is a LiViD group gift) as their aesthetic matches my preferred style, even better, LiViD clothing is suitable for all - including classic avatars. This means that my incentive to acquire an expensive mesh body in order to be able to wear a preferred designer's offerings is much diminished. However, I also wear some fabulous clothes from Pixicat (e.g. the Bastet range in Maitreya) so yes, I do own a mesh body.

The hair in this picture is from RAMA.SALON (Wednesday in Chromatic with the Styler HUD used - my breasts aren't huge so the default placement of the pigtails looks silly) and it will set you back around L$560 for the same hair style. Mostly I prefer Magika's hair, for which each style tends to come in a huge range of colours and with its own styling hud for around L$440 - I own Michelle.

My mesh body is actually a Ruth 2.0 and cost me absolutely nothing from The Little Black Dress - there's a bag on the floor of the shop when you arrive at the teleport point. While Ruth 2.0 isn't exactly the same as the Maitreya mesh body, many of the clothes seem to work well - and for those that don't and your skin peeks through a garment you just wear an alpha layer to hide your body in that area. So far I've been very pleased with it, so much so that I'm happy to buy un-demo'ed Maitreya-sized gacha items from the marketplace - it works that well.

My current head in the picture is my default head from my starter avatar of Morgan (the female witch with the lilac hair). My skin is Morgan's and I'm still using Morgan's green eyes, although I sometimes wear my THIS IS WRONG Solomon contact lenses in green on top for a bit of added interest. I picked them up during a Wanderlust Weekend for just L$50.

Morgan is short; a whisker under 5 foot tall, but well proportioned and doesn't have a huge butt (my avatar in RL already has one of those - I feel no need to have one in SL too). So although I've increased my height to 5'5" I've remained pretty much the same shape-wise.

The other thing I sometimes wear is purple gothic makeup, as in this picture:

I picked it up from the marketplace for L$9 from evldva Gothic Fashion. It is a tattoo layer.

You can also see my fingernails in this picture, they're the Ruth 2.0 BOM Hands with Nails from The Little Black Dress. If you go into Avatar > Edit outfit parts and select Edit on the hand you'll bring up the Build dialog. Select the Edit Linked check box and you can choose to colour your nails however you wish. Here I've gone for lavender.

The other things you can see in the second picture are a pair of jeans from the starter avatar Carla, which look better on me than any other jeans I've tried and a pair of glasses from The Black Forest. I picked up the spectacles for free from the Linden island I initially rezzed at but you can own a full permissions pair for L$10 if you shop on the Marketplace.

Now because I have a system head and a meshbody there's this point where you can see where they meet. So I also wear a neck extender/fix that I got for free from Apricot Paws. It's actually designed for furries (those are the avatars that are 6 foot tall bipedal dogs and cats) so I use the BOM (baked-on-mesh) chest version, the neck version is for those with giraffe-like necks.

Looking to the future I'm tempted to get a fancier animation overrider (several AO makers have basic versions for L$1). I could have a mesh head - although given that I appreciate the system head's flat affect for my Wednesday look and I have no interest in acquiring *adult* facial expressions I'm in no hurry and will probably begin with the Ruth 2.0 version - available for just L$1. I'm toying with the idea of getting a tattoo and have enjoyed trying out the tattoo freebies from the Valentine's Shop & Hop but haven't settled on anything in particular yet.

So to summarize then:

Shape: free

Skin: free

Eyes: free

Nails: free

Glasses: free

Contact lenses: L$50

Mesh body, feet and hands: free

Hair: L$1000 for two different hair styles

Makeup: L$9

Neck fix: free

Grand total: L$1059. Or in GBP about £2.67.

Love & Light,

♒️ Aqua ♒️