Review: Beauty Code, Upcoming Skin and Jewelry

Ok folks, so here's the deal - up until this point we as a team had been doing reviews of things we wanted to compliment and show off.   That's fine to do, but you and I both know that there's always something that we've seen that just doesn't work.  Just look at the Marketplace.  We've been talking about it, and getting our own critiques of this blog from other bloggers and we've decided that we can't always review only the really super good stuff, we have to start to review everything that we can. This blog just wouldn't be redneck if we didn't.  So, that in mind, we are imposing one rule on ourselves for this:  use this blog as a way to teach content creators to look at details they might have otherwise missed. 

With that in mind, we bring you the items given to us in our bloggers pack by CrusHer Mills of BeautyCode.  BeautyCode is a smaller boutique focusing more on low-price, high-desing earrings.  They recently seem to have expanded into making skins and full avatars as well; they are available in world and on the marketplace.  We were given a skin and a set of jewelry to review.  As we did not want to alter the look of the skin, we only cropped the photos and did not alter the tone, color, or blending.

For the skin, the texture is relatively well laid.  You can tell that it was done in a graphics program however, with the edges of the airbrushing being a little heavy handed compared to our usual skin choices around these parts.  Perhaps using a layer of gaussian blur in a graphics program such as Gimp or Photoshop would have helped.  The lipstick is also too dark for the skin itself; the color can be toned down by wearing other makeup over it though.  My personal preference also is that the skin is a little darker than this; I am used to seeing a nougat or cocoa color rather than vanilla or lighter.  I'd like to have been able to see more color options to really judge and get a good feel for what she has to offer.  She has two full avatars available on the marketplace which seem to have a darker skin tone to them.

I liked the jewelry better than the skin.  The earrings and necklace aren't bad, however they could have done somewhat better with the textures.  If you have any cleavage, I found it was hard to adjust the necklace though without it sinking in and some work to resize it. 

Overall, the skin and jewelry aren't bad, good for someone on a budget, but I think there could have been more attention paid to the finer detail work, and especially the textures in general.  For the jewelry, the textures just need to be refined if the chain were to stay like it is currently built.  The skin needs to have softer airbrushing and softening in general with some gaussian blur. 

Our photographer did however beg and plead to do one photo with his basic Photoshopping work:

Overall:  6/10

Pros:  Works well for a fashionista on a budget, and if you prefer lighter skins; pretty design on the jewelry

Cons:   Need more detail and softening on the skin, better attention to jewelry design and possibly a resize script.