FROM WOUNDS TO WRINKLES: THE RISE OF THE IMPERFECT BODY IN SECOND LIFE

A final look at the changing avatar

If the first article in this series was about darkness in fashion, the second about occult symbolism and the third about the wounded body, then the next development may be the strangest of all:

The deliberate rejection of perfection.

Second Life has always offered something that real life cannot easily provide: the ability to construct an almost impossibly beautiful body.

A resident can be young forever.

Skin can be flawless.

Waists can be impossibly narrow.

Legs can be perfectly shaped.

Breasts and buttocks can be exaggerated far beyond normal human proportions.

Faces can be symmetrical, smooth and permanently youthful.

In a world where physical imperfection can be removed with a slider, a texture or a new skin, why would anyone deliberately put it back?

Yet that is increasingly possible.

Cellulite can be added.

Bodies can be made heavier.

Stomachs can be made softer or larger.

Thighs can become fuller.

Buttocks can lose their perfectly sculpted appearance.

Wrinkles and age spots can be added to the face.

Mature and elderly skins and shapes are commercially available.

And some residents seem increasingly willing to exchange the conventional SL ideal for something considerably closer to an ordinary human body.

 

THE STRANGE REVERSAL OF VIRTUAL BEAUTY

This creates a remarkable paradox.

The physical world gives us enormous incentives to hide imperfections.

Second Life gives us the technical ability to eliminate them almost completely.

And yet some residents voluntarily recreate them.

It is almost the exact opposite of what we might expect from virtual beauty.

The avatar could be perfect.

Instead, it becomes human.

That distinction may be the key to understanding this trend.

The objective may not actually be to become ugly.

It may be to stop looking unreal.

 

FROM PERFECT TO PLAUSIBLE

For much of Second Life's history, the ideal female avatar was unmistakably artificial.

Tiny waist.

Large breasts.

Long legs.

Perfect skin.

Perfect makeup.

Perfect hair.

Perfect face.

The result could be extraordinarily attractive, but it was rarely mistaken for an average human being.

The arrival of increasingly sophisticated mesh bodies and heads made the fantasy even more elaborate.

But the same technology also created the possibility of doing something else: creating bodies that look more like actual people.

Current Second Life Marketplace products demonstrate this shift quite clearly. Cellulite overlays are sold specifically to add natural-looking texture to the buttocks, back and other areas of the body. Mature skins and facial add-ons offer wrinkles and age spots and are explicitly marketed as ways to make avatars look older and more realistic.

In other words, the technology that allows residents to become superhuman can also be used to become more human.

 

THE CELLULITE PARADOX

Cellulite is perhaps the clearest example.

In conventional beauty culture, cellulite is something to conceal.

It is associated with imperfection.

It is something advertisements, cosmetics and fashion imagery have traditionally attempted to remove from view.

In Second Life, however, a resident can deliberately purchase a cellulite layer and apply it to an otherwise flawless mesh body.

That is an extraordinary reversal.

The virtual body does not accidentally develop cellulite.

Someone has chosen to put it there.

The question therefore becomes:

Why?

There are several possible answers.

 

REALISM

The simplest explanation is realism.

A perfectly smooth virtual body can look artificial.

Adding cellulite, softer tissue and less-than-perfect proportions can make the avatar appear more believable.

This interpretation should not be underestimated.

Perhaps the resident is not trying to make herself less attractive at all.

Perhaps she is trying to make herself attractive in a different way.

Not perfect.

Plausible.

 

BODY POSITIVITY

Another possibility is body acceptance.

The avatar may be deliberately rejecting the idea that women must have perfectly smooth skin and perfectly proportioned bodies in order to be attractive.

In this interpretation, cellulite is not a defect.

It is simply part of being human.

The message becomes:

“This body does not need to be perfect.”

That is very different from uglification.

It is a rejection of the requirement to hide imperfection.

 

INDIVIDUALITY

There is another possibility.

Once everyone has access to the same beautiful mesh bodies, conventional beauty itself becomes generic.

A perfect body is no longer particularly distinctive when thousands of avatars have access to essentially the same ideal.

Imperfection can therefore become a form of individuality.

The slightly heavier body.

The unusual proportions.

The mature face.

The wrinkles.

The softer stomach.

These things can make an avatar stand out precisely because they depart from the template.

In that sense, imperfection becomes another fashion choice.

 

THE ANTI-FASHION POSSIBILITY

But there may be something more radical happening.

Fashion has traditionally told us what is desirable.

It establishes an ideal and encourages people to move toward it.

The emerging virtual aesthetic sometimes appears to work in reverse.

Instead of asking:

“How can I make my avatar more beautiful?”

the question becomes:

“How can I make my avatar more interesting?”

Those are not the same thing.

An interesting face does not necessarily have to be conventionally beautiful.

An interesting body does not necessarily have to be thin.

An interesting character does not necessarily have to look young.

The avatar becomes a form of self-expression rather than a beauty contest.

 

THE MATURE FACE

The face may be the most revealing example.

For decades, youth has been one of the strongest components of conventional female beauty.

Yet Second Life now offers dedicated mature and older skins, shapes and facial add-ons.

Some are explicitly marketed as ways to make an avatar look somewhere between 30 and 60.

Wrinkles, age spots and more mature facial structures can be added deliberately.

This is particularly significant because ageing is one of the things that virtual worlds could theoretically eliminate.

An avatar does not have to age.

There is no biological clock.

There is no menopause.

There is no unavoidable loss of skin elasticity.

There is no requirement to become older.

Age therefore becomes a choice.

And choosing it can be a surprisingly powerful statement.

Perhaps the resident is saying:

“I don't need to pretend to be twenty.”

Or perhaps:

“I want my avatar to look like an adult woman rather than an idealised fantasy girl.”

That distinction matters.

 

OLDER DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN UGLIER

This is also where the language becomes important.

A mature face is not necessarily an unattractive face.

An older woman can be beautiful.

A heavier woman can be beautiful.

A woman with cellulite can be beautiful.

But all three deliberately challenge the narrow visual vocabulary that has traditionally dominated virtual female beauty.

The real change may therefore not be from beautiful to ugly.

It may be from:

perfect → human.

That is a much more interesting interpretation.

 

THE CONNECTION TO THE FIRST THREE ARTICLES

At first glance, mature faces and cellulite seem unrelated to Gothic fashion, occult symbols or simulated wounds.

But there is a common thread.

The traditional avatar ideal attempts to eliminate everything that suggests weakness, mortality or imperfection.

Neo-Goth does almost the opposite.

It embraces darkness.

Occult fashion embraces forbidden symbols.

The wounded body embraces scars and damage.

And the imperfect body embraces age, weight and physical normality.

The common denominator is the rejection of the pristine avatar.

 

THE PERFECT BODY BEGINS TO LOOK BORING

There is perhaps an important cultural shift taking place here.

For years, Second Life's technological development was celebrated because it made avatars more realistic and more beautiful.

Higher-resolution skins.

Better mesh bodies.

Better faces.

Better hair.

Better lighting.

Better anatomy.

But once realism and beauty became technically easy to achieve, the next question was inevitable:

What do we do with that freedom?

One answer is to push beauty even further.

Another is to escape it.

The second answer may be what we are beginning to see.

Instead of making the virtual woman increasingly perfect, some residents are deliberately making her more ordinary.

Sometimes much more ordinary.

And sometimes deliberately older, heavier or less conventionally attractive.

 

FROM BEAUTY TO CHARACTER

This may be the most important distinction.

The perfect avatar is primarily a beautiful object.

The imperfect avatar can become a character.

A woman with wrinkles has a history.

A woman with cellulite looks as though she exists outside the fashion photograph.

A woman with a larger stomach looks less like a digital fantasy and more like an individual person.

The imperfections create biography.

They suggest that the body belongs to somebody who has lived.

And that is remarkably close to the logic of the previous article.

The scar tells us that something happened.

The wrinkle tells us that time happened.

The bruise tells us that something happened to the body.

The ageing face tells us that the body has existed for a long time.

The body becomes a story.

 

THE DARKER SIDE OF THE TREND

There is, however, another interpretation worth considering.

Could the increasing popularity of deliberately unattractive or damaged bodies represent a broader cultural fascination with the destruction of conventional beauty?

Perhaps.

The first article documented the rise of Neo-Goth.

The second documented the increasing use of occult imagery.

The third examined the aestheticisation of wounds.

And now we arrive at the deliberate introduction of age, weight and physical imperfection.

Taken individually, none of these phenomena is particularly mysterious.

Taken together, however, they suggest something larger.

The virtual fashion industry is becoming increasingly comfortable with images that conventional beauty culture traditionally excludes.

Death.

Darkness.

Demons.

Blood.

Scars.

Age.

Cellulite.

Weight.

Imperfection.

The beautiful avatar is no longer necessarily the flawless avatar.

 

THE GREAT VIRTUAL PARADOX

Perhaps this is the ultimate irony of Second Life.

The platform gives people an almost unlimited ability to escape their physical appearance.

And some residents use that freedom to reproduce it.

They can be twenty forever, but choose to look forty.

They can have perfectly smooth skin, but add cellulite.

They can have an impossibly slim waist, but choose a softer stomach.

They can have a flawless face, but add wrinkles.

They can be physically perfect, but choose to display scars.

The question is not why Second Life allows this.

The technology obviously does.

The more interesting question is why people increasingly find such imperfection aesthetically interesting.

 

THE END OF THE BEAUTIFUL AVATAR?

Probably not. The conventional ideal is not disappearing.

Second Life will continue to have glamorous, youthful, highly sexualised and extraordinarily beautiful avatars.

What appears to be changing is the definition of what else can count as beautiful.

The perfect body is no longer the only available fantasy.

There is now room for the mature body.

The ordinary body.

The heavier body.

The scarred body.

The damaged body.

The Gothic body.

The strange body.

The deliberately imperfect body.

And perhaps that is the real evolution of virtual fashion.

Second Life began by allowing us to escape the limitations of the physical body.

Its next stage may be allowing us to choose which physical limitations we actually want to keep.

 

FROM WOUNDS TO WRINKLES

Seen together with the previous articles, the progression is striking.

First, we changed the clothes.

Then we changed the symbols.

Then we changed the body by adding evidence of violence.

Now we are changing the body by adding evidence of humanity.

The question running through all four articles is therefore no longer simply:

“Why is Second Life fashion becoming darker?”

It may be something much broader.

Why are virtual humans becoming increasingly fascinated with everything that the traditional beauty ideal tells them to hide?

Perhaps the answer is not that residents want to look ugly.

Perhaps they simply want to look like something that a perfect avatar cannot be:

A person who has lived.

And perhaps that is the strangest fashion trend of all.