In The Garage

Far too much going on lately but one of the disappointments of recent weeks for me was the Vanity Skin Fair. My esteemed colleague Andie showed the good recently, but the sad truth is for guys... it kinda sucked. I was going to be kind and concede that men may not be such a big market as women, and with space limited I shouldn't be surprised we got a poor deal but sorry skin sellers of SL, you let us down. I saw the fair mentioned a couple of times in MENstuff chat, and on my own crawl around the lagfest I (quite literally) bumped into a few other men despite it being early Sunday morning.

Now after exploring all 46 stores I discovered us gents could pick up one freebie in the form of some technically unisex but really not very manly animal face paintings. Okay, so we didn't do well on free gifts, shouldn't grumble. I did pick up a couple of free demos to try on another day, but I felt no need to hurry a purchase since I spotted no hint that any items offered were discounted. Okay, so I'm just being greedy I know, no free gifts, no discounts... and in reality virtually no male skins at all! I didn't bother counting from the nightmare of lag but I would say easily less than 25% of the stores had any male items at all.

Which brings us to the vague point of the rant - do you even want men there? The male stores are scattered about, and some skin stores that I know sell male and female skins only had female skins on offer so even shopping by brands took me in more than a few blind alleys. This seems like a very self-fulfilling prophecy in the making - if none of the stores have anything for men then men won't shop, and more stores will convert to female only and less men will even bother turning up next time.

But that rant over, welcome to something cheerier! (Just ignore the slightly snarky comment about demos.)

Earlier today I was poking around Nikita Fride realising that a) I have no idea if I want some hair in coke or mocha or some strange shade of pink or blue and b) that I resent paying $1L for a demo when one of the group lucky chairs announced an F! Being in the group I glanced over and saw a man on the prize board so I jumped! Grabbing myself this free skin and shape!

You can thank Cron Nexen of OKEY DESIGNS for the wonderful Lewi Jeans, I had to shrink the bulge a little to avoid injuring people standing too close but the open fly does allow a bit of a glimpse of some more tattoos on this skin. And this skin has some tattoos, it also comes with a hairbase with rather stylised shaving going on.

Maybe the testosterone of this skin inspired the opening rant (and I seem to recall Nikita Fride didn't cater to us gents in the Skin Fair so grrr!) but I am enjoying this quite a bit. After my thoughtful work in the garage I grabbed myself a wife beater (still the most bizarrely named clothing item I can think of) and hit the stores for Monday Mania - I must confess to a little chuckle as I paced menacingly about some of my more usual stores. I suspect I'll linger like this a little while, a change is as good as a rest, and as free gifts go the Nikita Fride lucky chairs are fairly kind it must be said.