Here is the pic, Delicious cupcake skins are dark shades only, this is the middle one, image also belongs to Pooklet.


I think these skins are fabulous despite I do not use them, (yet) they are in my queue for edit. (Add sexy feet, anatomic details and remap/link for its use with Xhires female bodyshapes and Marvine's Bodybuilder)

Then he's not a real slim bodybuilder, hes just a Maxis shaped sim dressed as slim bodybuilder, real shapely sims are showerproof, it's determined by their skintone.

Very nice for someone that wants sims to look realistic. Much nicer than the old shiny skins. I don't want it though, gives me uncanny valley vibes. The eyes too. I don't have anatomical details on my sims except for nipples on females. I like my sims to be cartoony.

I know they are just slim bodybuilder clothes. I probably didn't like any of the skins because they would stand out from what I am using or were too realistic.

My opinion on this might end up unpopular, but only use maxis-match in my CC. I very prefer stylized and cartoony textures (my rule of a thump is if it looks like it could be from a Pixar movie, it's good for my game) Especially when it comes to skins I never found that the so called "realistic" ones look realistic at all, most of the time they just look greasy, over detailed and/or discoloured to me (but well, to each their own)
Thankfully there are some excellent maxis-match skins around so I can have a wider variety of skintones, but if those weren't available I'd just play with the 4 that came with the base game. But I'm glad I found the MM ones since it adds variety and more surprises to the genetics. I wish we could add genetic custom hair colours in the same way we can with genetised eyes and skins (meaning, for example adding a strawberry blonde category between red and blond etc.)

With hair it's the same, the very detailed hairs where there's a hundred lose strands flying everywhere aren't really my thing. Again I like it when the hair looks cartoon. I even have quite a few 4t2 hairs in my game.
Eyes again, I use the maxis ones or eyes that look like the maxis ones.
And with clothes too. But I think clothes are the easiest to find for MM.

Clothing and hair account for most of my CC.

This is not just with Sims BTW, I prefer it in general when characters and environments in computer games look cartoony and/or stylized, graphics that are too realistic gives me the Uncanny Valley vibe

They are bit older by now but Needlecream has made some edits of Enayla's skins that are more in line with how skins tend to look nowadays. I love Enayla's skins too but they're uh how should I put this.... a product of their time(? I mean "realistic" skins back then tended to be very shiny and oily looking) so they look really out of place in comparison to anything more recent.


Aha! So that means I now know at least 6 people who use my eyes aside of me!

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

As for my aesthetic, I call it semi-realistic maxis mix.

I don't like maxis match skins, eyes or hairs but clothes and items are fine and preferred. For hair I tend to go with slightly shinier textures, eyes more realistic (although I have played around with animation friendly options too) and with skins I just like Ephemera, period. (Or more precisely blends that use Ephemera's body textures as base since the actual Ephemera skins are like Enayla's skins; show their age and are too glowy for my tastes whereas blends tend to be more matte and therefore more my taste.) For clothes I have rare few photoskinned pieces that are good quality but most of them are maxis add-ons or conversions from Sims 3 (+few from Sims 4 too, Sims 4 clothes in my opinion lacks texture so most clothes converted from it tend to look too much like plastic :/ )

Other little details I like: Smooth hands, sexy feet or Marvine feet (I'm trying to swap to the latter since they're lower poly than sexy feet but much more detailed than maxis feet so I think it's a good midway) also clothes need appropriate morphs!

Something I hate: conversions of clothes made with Marvelous Designer, you know those supposedly "realistic" looking foldy clothes? Those things, I absolutely hate them and wish people stopped using MD for sim clothes completely. I'm also not fan of most newer hairstyles converted from Sims 4, both the hairs from the game itself and custom content.

Overall, I've gone from shiny realistic skins and hairs to more matte realistic-ish skins and hairs through the years I've played. I still wouldn't call my choice of skins maxis match but I've toned the glowiness down a lot during last few years.

Agree on the foldy clothes. Some slight folds are okay at the bottom of a skirt or some such, but when the entire outfit is a great big mess of folds, it just looks like someone has completely missed out on how clothes behave when a sim sits down or moves in any way other than standing straight. Those clothes are meant strictly for simple posing, not for actual playing... Also, the polycount must be through the roof? *shudders* As for the CC hairs, I think a lot of the problem is the meshing - it's usually high poly and I keep wondering why they're so high poly when they look like they could easily be half and even lower. For my part I have so many hairs already I kind of just need to stop at a point. I'd prefer the ones I have to be low-ish poly (I never check, though).

I don't like the hairs from TS4, and a lot of the CAS content has some kind of quality to it that makes it stand somewhat out from TS2 and TS3. Not entirely sure what it is, probably the textures. I keep downloading stuff, and then not using it. I guess I keep thinking it just needs a bit of recoloring to look alright or something like that.

I like what I like. I don't much care whether it's Maxis, Maxis Match, photo-skinned, semi-realistic, or realistic. I'm not really sure what some of these terms mean anyway. If I like it, then my Sims will wear it. I like to please my Sims, but I tend to assume they like the same kind of things that I do. Giving all my CAS Sims the same turn-ons as myself tends to make them think a bit like me.

Eyes are all Maxis. I never really look my Sims in the eye. I'm afraid they'd think I'm staring at them. I couldn't tell you the eye-colour of any of my Sims, not even Andrew's.

Skin at the moment is Maxis for males, and slightly modified Maxis for females. (Females without nipples just look weird!) I have downloaded some higher resolution skins, but I haven't started using them yet. I only just switched from low to high resolution when I got my new laptop last month, and even the Maxis stuff is so much better than I've been used to, that I'm still getting used to it. I really don't feel the need yet for anything better. My Sims game now has better graphics than Real Life, as I'm short-sighted. So everything in real life is low-resolution to me until I put my glasses on! Realistic? Well realism to me means low resolution, so my Sims game is better than "realistic"!

I have lots of hair, so that all my Sims look different. Favourite sources are Peggy, Raon, XM Sims, Newsea, DeditalSheep and Sizz. And quite a few of my favourite Sims, including Andrew and Gloria, have Maxis hair.

For clothes I'm even more eclectic than for hair. I quite like some Maxis female clothes (usually the ones that other Simmers hate!) but find most Maxis male clothing rather boring. But maybe that's just "realistic", because I find most real life male clothing rather boring too. Amongst my favourite clothing sources/creators are Simphany.com, SimGuys, SimplyStyling.de, CloudNine, KnightSkyKyte, Fakepeeps7, Bruno, Charity and quite a few more that I can't remember right now. I think most of those would count as Maxis Match, but, to be honest I neither know nor care. A few of my older downloads are flood-filled. Some, I'm pretty sure, are photo-skinned. Again, if I like them, I go on using them. As I said at the beginning, I like what I like.

So, all in all, I just don't know how "matchy" my Body Shop stuff is.

Hey! That's Sim Sample's favourite clothes designer.

I don't really ask myself if anything is maxi match or not - I just ask myself if I like it. That means that my game is mismatched - but it suits me fine

Your eyes are FANTASTIC! Thank you so much! I love them! And thank you SOOOO much for the Enayla edits - I will download those today!

@Joandsarah yep! Sorry for the late response here, but yes - to me those skintones look like characterized versions of what I see in the mirror, so there's no uncanny valley for me at all, since -although more realistic- that's still clearly not a real person LOL. It's one of those things - and why representation is so important - being painted as brown versus a weird orange colour means I can see myself in the character way better. As you said, white-pale is really not 'real' either, but those shades do the same things for lighter skinned people that Pooklet's do for folks like me: it lets you see yourself, within a frame of reference that is imaginary, but still based on reality.

That said, I'm not necessarily saying that Maxis-Match = not diverse, it just seems to me that brown skinned people tend to look orange in those matte skins (often because they don't incorporate the shading that makes dark skin unique. I'm not the same colour all over for example, and even really really dark skin has some shading to it.) Throw on straight hair and you end up with an orangey-brown sim that might as well be purple for all the realism it has, and that said - I really love simmers like BerryNooboo who's sims are rainbow colours! That style is super cute.

With all the new stuff that's come out over the years, I'm sure there's more variety than there was when I started playing, but I'll be sticking to my semi-realistic style so I can play in a way that feels right to me. :D