When I ventured forth to begin the blogger previews at Skin Fair 2015 I immediately realised that this year the event is going to be a bit of a corker. As you can tell from my previous posting, I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all.  In fact, I’m pretty confident in my assertion that you will not be disappointed, there are some amazing skins on offer and I’m not even going to choose one favourite from everything that I’ve seen and tried so far because it’s impossible.  Before I proceed any further with my reviews let me just give you a few notes on the layout this year; it’s incredibly straightforward to navigate the two sims. It’s obviously been designed to be easy upon the eye and to not overload the senses or your computer. For an event of this magnitude it would be all too easy to create a complex, dazzling location but the fact that this location will be utterly swamped with avatars (and therefore inevitably crash city for the majority of visitors) has evidently been at the forefront of the production team’s mind. I appreciate that. The sim is clean, uncluttered with white buildings and an easy to navigate layout across two levels, and it just works.

Anyway, back to the reviews. Confession time: I had never heard of the YUMYUMS brand until Skin Fair, BUT that’s the point of events like these isn’t it? They open your eyes to new labels and designers, as well as introduce you to new works by your old favourites.To be perfectly honest the naming convention of the brand and the styling made me think YUMYUMS was going to be uber kawaii (Newsflash:it is!), so when I put the skin on I was a little apprehensive,because as much as I love that kind of look it’s not something I regularly wear. Of course, I needn’t have worried because Hope is absolutely bloody divine and perfectly easy to adapt to a pretty regular avatar about town like myself.

The main thing that struck me about this skin is the quality of the colour across the body and how well it’s been blended. There aren’t any hard edges at all, it has an almost soft focus quality to it and a light and airy feel, which I know sounds utterly bonkers but go ahead and try a demo and you’ll see what I mean. The colour is even and applied perfectly to detail areas. It’s incredibly satisfying to wear.

If you like to sport a mesh body in-world you’ll be delighted to know that this is a skin that looks ruddy awesome naked. I tried ‘Hope’ with my Maitreya Mesh Body and was incredibly impressed by how beautiful she looked. If you like taking snaps then rest assured that this is a skin that will photograph very well. (In fact, don’t laugh but her nipples on the Maitreya bod looked awesome!)

What I really like about ‘Hope’:

• I’m wearing the ‘Latte’ tone and it’s a lovely colour. Not too pale or too strong, a mid-tone in the true sense of the term with perfectly distributed colour across the body.
• I’m cheating a bit here, but features such as the blush layer, along with freckles and moles make this a very authentic looking skin.
• A lovely array of lip shades and appliers for practically EVERYTHING!

The face is probably the most important part of a skin, and here is where Hope really comes into her own. She has a very wholesome feel to her which is probably due to the choices of blush and the ability to add freckles to her should you so wish. ‘Hope’ looks flushed in a very attractive manner indeed. In fact, this is probably why I decided to try her with ginger brows, something that I wouldn’t normally do. I’m glad I took the chance to try her in a different colour way to what I am used to because with her ginger brows, coupled with the latest hair from EXILE (available at Collabor88) and my juicy PXL Sweet Lips she looks blooming amazing doesn’t she?

Speaking of appliers I’ve NEVER seen such a comprehensive Applier HUD in my entire Second Life. Click HERE to see what I mean!

The HUD covers all the important brands of mesh attachments; bodies, mouths and hands and feet and was very responsive and easy to use. I sometimes find that when I load a HUD I have to wait for it to warm-up before it works, do you ever find that?Well, no problems with this one at all. It was incredibly responsive. It’s also really nice to look at in its own right; well-designed and nice and big and bright.

As I mentioned in my list above something else that I really like about ‘Hope’ are the lipstick options.  There are are a couple of packs available at the event to choose from, and joy of joys IoKKo MoLko has made appliers for the PXL Sweet Lips which I’m  rocking at the moment. There are LOADS of delicious colours to choose from and they all look absolutely nomworthy. I mean, you know how I feel about pink right? I even LOVED the pale pink lipstick shade, am I ill?!!

I decided to play about further with this skin and added hair from ELIKATIRA along with one of the lipstick shades (this time without my PXL Sweet Lips) and woah, am I channelling Molly Ringwald in this shot or what?!

Readers, ‘Hope’ is an absolutely smashing skin; I am incredibly impressed with her. In fact you could say that YumYums have given me hope, but that would be cheesy..so I’m not going to say that. Nope, not at all.

I will say that she is definitely worth adding to any self-respecting Skin Addicts repertoire, and on the strength of this release YUMYUMS is a brand I’ll definitely be keeping a very close eye on in future!

SKIN FAIR 2015 is open NOW!!   (YumYums is booth 49, Sim 1)