Real Life Inspiration

Sometimes skin creators in Second Life™ take inspiration from real life to create a pretty convincing look-alike avatar of a person who actually exists. I wonder if skins we don’t necessarily recognise are in fact also based on or inspired by real people. Maybe we’re all running around in SL looking like someone’s relative. Sooner or later, someone in a gasmask will ask you “are you my mommy” (that’s a Doctor Who reference that will be making a colourful stain on the wall over the heads of a lot of people, but oh well… philistines!) Birth created the Freddie skin for the Lelutka Skyler head and I immediately recognised which real life person they were emulating with this look. A Swedish football-playing and Calvin Klein underwear modelling blast from the past, Freddie Ljungberg.

If you want it to look like the poster you need to use the shape and brow shape that comes with this skin, which were made for the “dated” version of the Skyler head. You’ll find the dated version in the head’s package as a separate item that needs to be unpacked. The only thing that is “dated” about this version of the head is the rigging, in any other sense it’s up to date. Newer versions have been updated with more/different connection points to the SL bones, which means the head reacts differently to the sliders in the shape editor and shapes that look good with the dated version, will look quite weird with the updated head and visa versa.

I created my own shape for the updated Lelutka Skyler head and the Birth Freddie skin, without making any effort to make it look like Mr Ljungberg, but of course there was always going to be hint of Freddie in it. I gave him hair, which is a luxury the real life Freddie hasn’t had in quite some time now. There is something in the DNA of many blond Swedish men that makes them lose their hair quite early on, or at least that’s my best guess going by what I’m seeing in the streets of Stockholm. Now without any further ado, here are the full credits

• Birth Freddie skin & their body skin for Legacy. The facial stubble is part of the skin
• Lelutka Skyler mesh head 3.1
• Legacy Meshbody
• Modulus Bailey hair
• Avi-Glam Solstice eyes (applied to mesh eyes that come with the head)
• Billy Beaverhausen Fred shape for Lelutka Skyler and Legacy Meshbody
• Noche mesh nipples
• Noche Armani mesh crop top