148: No Match hair

No.Match / No Fail

As I mentioned a post or two ago, I recently read a plaintive blog post from a lady who had worked hard to cultivate a relationship with a designer; she blogged about the designer's products and the designer gave her free stuff about which to blog. But when she went into the hospital, even after preparing the designer for this, she got dumped. I'm still thinking there are better ways to arrange this relationship, if indeed is a relationship ... sounds a little hinky to me. Hmm, you mean that just entirely by coincidence you are raving about every single thing a particular designer has produced this year?  Suuuuure...
   I'm still in the mood to blog about interesting products in Second Life, if and when I discover them, and I'll pay for them myself, thanks just the same. That way I can say what I like about them and my readers might actually believe what I have to say. I don't know when the balance of power shifted from the blogger to the designer, but I think it might be time to flip the paradigm. People, if you want to be taken seriously as a fashion blogger, spend a year or two without sucking up for handouts; buy stuff that makes you look good and blog about it.  Then when you develop a reputation for having personal style, smart designers will send you stuff hoping you'll blog about it. Be in charge and pay your own bar tab and you'll go a lot further.

   The other day I saw the latest edition of l'Homme Magazine SL -- and congratulations on your first year anniversary, by the way, I intend to drop in to your Blue Party tomorrow if I can -- and saw an advertisement for some interesting men's hair from a company called No.Match (page 39/40). I tracked them down (the SLURL is here; I had to get quite clever to find them, so make sure you use this SLURL) and bought six pieces of hair. Then I tried it all on, fitted it, went to Kowloon (SLURL is here) and took pictures, and here's the results.

No.Match / No Fail

Now, of the six pieces of hair, I got two that I really like, two that are okay, and two that I will probably file away. (Strangely enough, the one that caught my eye in the first place in l'Homme Magazine SL is one of the ones that I'll probably file away, but it might be to your taste.)  The first one that I really like is at the top of this post, called No Fail. It's short and messy, much like me in RL, and it has a really interesting shape cut into it. If I saw someone with this haircut in RL I would think that they had spent $200 and two hours with

No.Match / No Rest

a talented haircutter, and it would take 15 minutes every morning with product and appliances to get it to look like this. But for a couple of days now, this has been my go-to hair.
   The drawback is that, like all the hair in this post, you have to wear a tattoo-layer hairbase. But the amazing part is that, at least for us gingers, the designers have very thoughtfully included some tattoo-layer beauty marks to go with my freckles.  The marks look awesome, and it's not the designer's fault that I am always trying

No.Match / No End

to figure out just which five tattoo layers I can afford to wear. Here, it was either my new favourite beard or the beauty marks, and the beard won. Be warned
-- you will need to spend some time fitting this hair and re-sizing it and shifting it in tiny little increments until it's just right.
   The next new hair I'm loving is No Rest, a shoulder-length hair that has that bedhead thing going on that I love so much (and that takes so much mudding paste in RL). It took me a while to figure out that it's slightly

No.Match / No Horizon

asymmetrical -- more full on one side than the other. Apparently I slept on it wrong, which happens. Great hairline, great looking from the back and sides, this is a real winner if you want to look like you haven't had a haircut in a while and you used a leave-in conditioner at the gym but forgot your blow-dryer. Which, actually, is kind of my personal style. This one is in the magazine and caught my eye.
   There were two styles that I bought that are very similar, because, okay, I am fascinated with long hair even

No Horizon, with the haloing effect

though I rarely wear it. No End and No Horizon are almost the same, both about chest-length hair. When I see hair like this in a store, I go Ooooooooo and buy it, never remembering until I get it home that if you are a guy with big shoulders and pecs, the damn hair is going to poke through your body at some point and there's not much anyone can do about it until someone reinvents how gravity works in SL. I love wearing long hair with a business suit, indicating, you know, after this business meeting I'm going back to my

No.Match / No Attention

bowl of granola. But I don't feel like that very often and these are unlikely to get much use.
   The other reason I won't be using these much is a strange one -- it's because the hair is beautifully designed and textured. There are little wispy bits of hair in attractive strands that come away from your hair, and it looks really natural and beautiful. This really is what long thick beautiful hair looks like. Unfortunately as a side effect there is a strange moire effect if you are standing in front of, say, the ocean. Which

No.Match / No Shelter

happens lots in SL, actually. This produces a weird haloed effect like -- well, you can see in the picture, it looks like what sometimes happens when you're wearing a foot alpha and standing on a dance-floor with flashing lights. There's a little brightness that is kind of disconcerting. So if you're buying this for a photo shoot, well, pick your spot carefully.
   Finally there are two pieces of hair that I just had to have because they are so damn interesting, but honestly, I'll just never wear them. I'm not an
epicene fashion model type with single-digit body fat and too much guyliner, I don't live in a post-apocalyptic sim, and nobody is hiring me as a dress extra for The Matrix.  So the waist-length dreads (No Attention) that I saw in the magazine were fascinating (especially in white-blond); gorgeous textures, beautiful look, super-realistic, you just want to reach out and touch them to get that kind of oily dry feeling that you get from great dreads. But they're not me; I'm not that guy. (I would have shaved my head in a fury about six months in.) And you have to stand very still in SL or else they go through your shoulders, arm, et cetera.
   The other interesting hair that's going into storage is No Shelter, which I put into a folder marked "Updo". The funny thing is, there is a guy who goes to my RL gym who has this hair; I think he plays bass guitar in a local bar band, he's covered in tattoos, and he looks fierce, so I grabbed the hair, thinking "Yeah!" I do not feel fierce in this hair, I feel kind of like one of the Golden Girls going to a seniors' dance. This is my fault ... I just don't seem to have the style necessary to pull this off. It's really nicely designed; there's even a separate piece for bangs you attach or not, as you think appropriate. I expect this is what someone who has the long thick hair of No Horizon or No End does when they want to get their damn hair out of the way while they wash the dishes or shampoo the dog, or whatever. But it just didn't feel like me.
   So, all things considered, I bet you'll find something at No.Match that will interest you. It's definitely not hair for everyone; you need a certain amount of "fuck you, I like my hair this way" to bring it off. But if you want to stand out and/or create an effect, it will be L$200 well spent. Yes, every hair you see here is L$200, cheap as borscht, and it usually comes with a HUD that, at least for the reds, lets you select among nine different shades and resize the hair. The designers are doing cutting-edge work, the hair looks like HAIR, and if it's you, it really will be you. Check it out.