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Carved Stone Animal Wig Series

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...or more like Carved Stone Animal HELL. No, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. But really, I could cry tears of joy that this series is finally done. Tears of absolute mirthful joy.

I should note that I'm about to have a bit of a whine here, so if you have any respect for me, you might not want to read on. I mean, I would normally just put a "no comment" sort of thing on here, but I want to talk about my neurotic thought process for this series because I know there are people who didn't like it, but I'd to explain WHY it went the way it did. I don't blame people for feeling the way they do, obviously it's my fault if I couldn't get it to work, but I still want to get it off my chest.

Little bit of background: I've been doing the Monthly Collection wig series for three years now. First one was the gemstones, then the zodiac, then this.

When I did the gemstones, I came away from that learning two things. 1) People don't like outrageous colors. 2) Too many of the wigs were obviously female.

When I did the Zodiac, I kept those two things in mind, so I pitched the idea of having them be transformable. This served two purposes: If someone didn't want the outrageous hair part of it, they could simply remove it, and the shorter version could double as male hair. This sort of worked, but it was difficult and I didn't really want to do another series after that.

Well no one else did either, so I tried a new theme (The rockabilly, punk and gothic wigs) but I ran out of ideas and abandoned that.

The new-new theme would be animals, I decided, because I feel the monthly collections should be really special. Not something you should expect to restock, you know? You're putting down two bucks on this, it oughta be decent.

So, I was inspired mostly by Camilla d'Errico, who tends to pile animals on top of pretty waifs heads (I forgot, of course, that our bases are anything but waify, and that their stupid heads take up a quarter of the real-estate.) The general idea went like this:

Stone animal gives you the animal-of-the-month by itself.
Feminine side of the wig actually has variant of said animal woven through the hair.
Masculine side has coloring or pattern based on said animal.
Item versions include the stone animal, animal part, and either the life cycle of that animal, or the animal's habitat, whichever works best.

I wanted this to appeal to a LOT of people. Not just trendy avatar people, but also the ones who are off-the-wall, as well as people who collect stuff for pet treasure chests.

The first wig, the moth, goes over okay. I think people like the male version more, and are grossed out by the moths, but hey they'll get used to it. Next month is lovebirds, and I think this is the most popular. I still see people wearing the female side (don't think I've ever seen the male.) So yeah, we're doing good! Next is snakes, no controversy that I can remember.

Then came the blue morphos. This set marked a change. People weren't really gelling with the female wigs, they wanted the animals separate. That obviously wouldn't be possible for a number of reasons, so on the next wig, I had a choice. I chose to try something new and make it so that, instead of having animals, the female side would be in the SHAPE of a particular animal (or something related to it.) Little did I know the precedent I would accidentally set with the frog wig. Why did I add the brown highlights? Because you could barely see the buns if it was black, and frog eggs aren't black anyway. That was my justification.

The fish wig I thought was the cleverest. In a way, it was a letdown, because this set I REALLY wanted to base on this [link] middle picture in the second row by Sheila Wolk. My mom really likes that painting. Because of the new rule I imposed on myself, I decided not to. I actually think this came out cooler. The only problem is nobody seemed to get that the girl's wig was in the shape of one of those bubble eyed goldfish. No. No, because they were too busy complaining that the hair was ORANGE AND BROWN AGAIN. Also because there were two female wigs because guys can't have long hair, oh no.

But let's go back to the orange and brown thing, because that is what's really annoying me. You know what the major complaint was against my first set of wigs, the gemstone ones? The colors were too much. They just weren't versatile. So what is versatile? Natural hair colors. Okay. Not a problem. However, I still wanted the hair color to at least sort of match the animal. The thing there is that most animals, if they are of natural colors, ARE ORANGE AND BROWN. Trust me, I looked for blonde fish.

And honestly, the wigs that are the offenders AREN'T the same shades. The frog wig is black with bluish highlights and orangish streaks. The fish wig is a grey red with purplish highlights. The male octopus and female lizard are definitely brown and orange. The turtle wig was the last, so I was beyond caring, but it's a really rich dark brown with almost yellow orange highlights. To mimic tortoiseshell, or the the turtle it was based on. The turtle it is in the shape of. I guess I could have made the side bangs and the pigtails green to mix it up?

Other than that, I don't know. I mean, it's my own fault that I've got this rigid set of guidelines (hair MUST match the item versions, item versions MUST accurately reflect the animal) but still. I just think it's a weird thing to get hung up on, when I only trying to make sure it's versatile. I mean, I'm already asking you to put bugs in your hair, or do it up in the shape of an ugly fish, the least I can do is make sure you have a natural color, otherwise it's a little too far out there, you know?

wigs belong to subeta.net
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Mdwyer5's avatar
I did a collage of the Carved Stones too

Subeta Carved Stones by Mdwyer5