A Hairy Situation

It's been a while since I made a post with a pun for its title, and I'm sure that you've instantly worked out what this post will be about.

We last received new hairstyles as drip-feeds throughout 3.0, with the results being the quite-decent specimens of Pigtails, Double-Braided, and Shaggy, the bizarre specimens of Pompadour and whatever that unnamed short female hairstyle is, and the "what-the..." specimens of Afro, Dreadlocks, and... shudder... Undercut.

Now, for the first time since the first hairstyle bundle was released immediately after the Appearance Designer made its long-awaited arrival, an entirely new hairstyle bundle has been added to the Cartel Market. Compared to the previous one, this one offers a slightly more disappointing range of additions, since whilst the previous one included four hairstyles (two female, one male, and one unisex), this one offers only three (I know, one fewer, how will we cope?), two of which are unisex whilst the third is a female-only style.

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Two of these hairstyles are new and have no in-game precedent, whilst the third is the very long-awaited "Shaecut", first seen of course worn by Shae Vizla before Tora got the ball rolling with her blue version of the cut. I'm fairly sure various NPCs around Zakuul and on Odessen also have this hairstyle in different colours as well. This style is the only non-unisex style offered in this bundle, and is allocated to female characters.

The first unisex style was a style which I had previously termed "the Grindelwald" due to how it resembles the Dark Wizard's hair from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them from the front with its shaved-sides undercut look. Now that it's gone live, twin braids have been discovered at the back which has turned quite a few people away from it. Curiously, female Inquisitors seem to be immune to the braids even though every other class and gender representation thereof has them.

The second unisex style is very reminiscent of a fine mop head just being splashed on a character's head. So obviously you don't need me to tell you what I've termed it. In terms of design it's certainly the most... 'interesting'... hairstyle to come to the game for a very long time, since depending on your character's gender and body type it may look fine or it may make you look similar to a typical "emo/goth" youth.

IT'S NOT A PHASE, DAD!

The most interesting thing to note about the two unisex styles is how their artistic style is so very different compared to the rest of the in-game styles. Most hairstyles have their detailing 'sculpted' in without any realistic attempt at rendering loose strands, something which these two hairstyles have tried their hand at doing. The result is certainly... something. I've jokingly compared these styles to an artistic direction you're more likely to see in The Sims rather than The Old Republic, and I'm sure you can see why.

Next step, more beards in a similarly-new art style, please!

Anyway.

Because I'm more a fan of unstyled and loose-hanging hairstyles in situations where combat is a potential necessity, I have rarely gone for any other hairstyle for my female characters than the "Jaxocut", or female hairstyle 3. It does provide something of a sight issue for left-handed Agents and Troopers (if only that was a customisation option...), but otherwise it's largely been my default go-to shoulder-length option.

Now the Shaecut has come along and provided a nice and 'light' alternative (due to the 'bulb' at the back of the long hairstyle introduced with 2.1's bundle I have this preconception that it's "too heavy" for my liking), I decided to try it out on Calph. She'd had the Jaxocut for a very long time now, although she did briefly switch out to the "shaggy-bun" option at one point during 2.0, so I felt it was time for an update to her look.

Unfortunately, the Shaecut is one of those which just does not react well with ginger or orange hair, which Calph's hair colour had been since I fell in love with the newer orange colour whilst trying it out during a total revamp of my long-gone male Operative. Ginger and orange are rendered far too brightly on several of the new hairstyles, which is a real shame.

So finally, after about three years of being ginger, Calph has returned to possessing brownish hair just as she did before.

Well, almost. She previously utilised hair colour 3, which is more of a sandy blonde, but this now clashes horribly with Calph's current main two outfit choices so I had to return to the drawing board. The darker shade of brown (colour 6) which I eventually decided upon just works beautifully with the Shaecut, and as an unintended result Calph's hair is now an awful lot closer to the shade of my own hair than it ever used to be.

Calph wasn't the only character to receive a new hairstyle with this bundle, though.

I've been binge-playing my DvL Juggernaut like heck the past two weeks, so I decided to try out "the Mop" unisex hair on her, since I had noticed that it actually looked decent on the slimmest body types, which I always use to represent characters in their late teens. Since Ferok'ia was utilising said body-type and I've been growing more fond of her with each day I play as her, I figured she was the perfect subject to experiment on.

As you can hopefully see, it doesn't look that bad at all on a body-type-1 female character. My main complaint about it is a complaint shared for some other recent hairstyles, which is that it is too shiny, but I can look past that for this.

Additionally, the hairstyle is rendered semi-translucent on the character portrait. This also shows that the character portraits are not rendered "in-full" since this translucency does not reveal the rest of the character's skull underneath the hair, but instead everything just shines through as if the hair was a part of the skull. Not really a complaint as such, but just a bizarre side-effect.

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I'm pleased they've added more new hairstyles to the game with 5.2.1, and of course I'm ecstatic to see Shae's hair among them. I hope we'll be seeing more bundles like this in the near future, since the completely new hairstyles' art style has a lot of potential.