Close-Up: Pearly Whites

About a year and a half ago, CJ and I started Tête à Pied for no other reason than my desire for more complex, nuanced makeup, red brows, which at the time were pretty much unheard of, and maybe even earn us enough money to help CJ out with tier and me with my shopping habit. It amazes me how much Second Life and Tête has changed since then. Content creators have come and gone, there is more than one brand that has been born and experienced huge growth in half the time that we've been around.

Normally, I tend to keep my blog posts rather dry, professional, impersonal. It's hard for me to speak from the heart in such a public way but I am so overwhelmed by the experience of this putting out our Vivant line that I'm compelled to bare just a little bit more of myself. I don't want to come across as someone acting the part of of the pretentious artist, but I think we have grown so slowly because we see Tête à Pied as a means of expression and personal creativity first, and a business second.

I can't help but feel it's time to really drive home what we are about: quality, craftsmanship, integrity. I am really proud to say that our skin stands up to the closest scrutiny. While no skin can be to everyone's personal taste nor work perfectly with every avatar shape, we believe that after hours of testing and comparison, Vivant matches up with the best Second Life has to offer. It exhibits hundreds of hours of hard work and years of skill. Vivant is the combination of CJ's years of experience with photo shop and my life-long love affair with makeup. Not so long ago, I worked in cosmetics and I've always been passionate about it. More than any other line we've done in the past, Vivant is about that love. I spent weeks researching & creating makeup looks and still more weeks with CJ discussing and implementing the technical execution of these looks. Each look is unique, many with features (like a specific kind of liner) that are specific to that makeup look alone.

We have had amazing feedback from bloggers, friends, customers, and other content creators. CJ and I would like to thank all of you for your recognition and compliments. We have had so much great coverage but there are a lot of details and subtle improvements that many might have not noticed so from time to time, I will highlight them here. Today it will be our teeth. For our Vivant line, we wanted to make sure that we didn't neglect a single feature and with photography loving fashionistas on the rise, we couldn't help but notice some not so picture perfect smiles. We were guilty of it ourselves, the first picture is our old teeth, the default Linden teeth. As you can tell in the old picture, the default teeth have a gray cast to them and the bottom of them is uneven. I didn't take a picture but the tongue is a bit too bright red to look natural. Our new tongue is a more natural shade and our teeth are brighter, whiter, straighter, and model perfect.




Now onto your sneak peek....

For those of you that were wondering, yes, we are continuing our Calendar Girl series but with the new Vivant skin range. Expect the release to come out in a day or two. For now, you will have to be content with a look at one of the 3 makeups we will release with our septembre outfit. This is septembre 1 in out buff skin tone. As it often happens, the outfit was designed first and the makeup was created to coordinate with it. Sometimes the makeup idea comes from a specific photograph or image but this month I just played around a bit until I found something that was pleasing to the eye. I wanted just a hint of a cat's eye to the liner to give a nod to hint of period influence in the outfit but I wanted to keep it fresh and contemporary. This is where the color comes in. Die-hard Tete fans might notice that the little tail on the cats eye is in a different spot than usual, it arises from the lower lid. I saw that style on a french blog when doing research for the line. If I ever manage to find the link again, I will gladly post it. She had a whole section on just cat's eyes and it was amazing the variety that is possible.