Okay. I’ll be honest with you. This is the inventory-management post that I’ve procrastinated over the most, and I think you know why. Hair is one of those inventory things that we all accumulate at a frightening rate, and usually in such massive fatpacks that it’s easy to add thousands of items to your inventory in a single freebie hair spree. And then just the thought of sorting it all… well…

You’re with me on that, right? I hope so, because this post has now – finally! – gone into my draft post queue so that I can work on it. By the time you eventually read it, it will probably have been sitting there for a month or two while I polish it (or I may have been brave and just bitten the bullet in one go).

So anyway! Onward! Today we’re going to delve into the horrifying, tangled miasma of our hair folders.

Bear with me. Out of necessity this post will contain a lot of text, but I’ll try to put enough images in that your eyes won’t glaze over ;)

Hop behind the cut!

The thing with hair fatpacks is, well, they’re fat. I’ve seen fatpacks that contain over seventy different colours and, unless you’re very dedicated to that particular style, there’s no way on the grid you’re going to wear all of those. However, if you’re anything like me you’re reluctant to throw away or archive anything you might suddenly need to match to that emerald green outfit, or to wear to that ‘best in mauve’ contest. There is also the vexed question of ‘how do you file your hair?’, so you can see why I’ve been procrastinating over this post: there are so many possibilities! In the end, I’ve decided to just give you a few pointers, and we begin with asking some questions.

Your inventory is personal to you, and so it should make sense to you. It’s easy for me to say ‘file by store’, but what if you go by length, or colour? To that end, the first question is:

When you want to find a hairstyle in inventory, how do you think of it?

If your thoughts are of the ‘oh, Uncleweb hair would look great with this outfit’ type, then create your filing system by store. If you think, ‘hm, this needs a shoulder-length style/an elegant up-do…’ then file by length and/or style. If you think, ‘omg I need blonde hair with pink streaks!’ then… well, I would say file by colour, but how many blonde with pink streaks hairstyles would you have? Finally, there are what I call the ‘genre’ options: grungy, Neko, Goth, punk: the kind of thing you would only wear with a specific type of look.

Regardless, pick a ‘top level’ folder organisation that feels right for you: store, style, length, colour, genre. Then, consider what your sub-folders would be. If your top level is ‘store’ then would your sub-folder be ‘style’ or ‘colour’ or ‘length’? Or would you simply put all of the hairs from that store into that folder? It’s entirely up to you. Whatever you decide upon, you’ll eventually come to your second question, which is:

Which colours will I actually WEAR?

I know, I know. All of them, possibly, at some time or another. But, think back and try to remember the last time you wore that pink-streaked blonde style. If it was more than a few months ago (or even never) then you can safely archive it. Most of us, however, have certain colours that we wear, and some of us are lucky enough to have a signature colour (which means we can archive or throw away anything that isn’t that colour!)

If you only ever wear brown, or blonde, or red hair, then you’re already onto a winner and can archive everything else. However, many of us like to chop and change, so it’s a good idea to keep the best of the basic colours, and maybe a few of the exotics that you know you might wear.

So, we’ll begin with creating our folders. Mar always puts her hair folder into the inventory ‘body parts’ folder, but you can create it wherever you want. Start the folder name with an exclamation point, then leave a space or two, then the name, like this:

Now, open up a second inventory window (File > New Window) and in that window, run a search for HAIR. This should pick up a lot of the folders you have hanging around in your inventory, so drag those over into the main !  HAIR folder. Once that’s done, clear the search and start looking manually. If there’s anything you’re not sure of, then create another folder (call it something like !  MAYBE HAIR?) and drag it into there, so you don’t forget it and can check it out later.

Once you’ve dragged across everything you can find, it’s time to create your sub-folders. Again, begin them withan exclamation point, then a space or two, then your chosen sub-folder type (store, style, colour, etc). Mar’s gone for by-store:

If you’ve decided to file by store, then your next task is easy: simply drag across the individual hairstyle folders into the relevant store folders. Naturally, you’re going to have a few odd, single style folders that don’t fit anywhere, but that’s okay. Those can just sit at the bottom of the top level folder.

Those of you filing by style, create your style folders. If you’re not sure what you want, try teleporting to a large hair store and seeing how they organise their hair sections. Also, think about how far down you want to sub-divide. Will ‘cropped’ be detailed enough to describe a very short hairstyle, or do you discern between a short cropped style and a more gamine style? You may simply decide on ‘short, medium, long, up-do, braids’ etc and that will be enough for you, or you may want to drill down into great detail. It all depends on how big a hair fan you are ;)

Those of you filing by colour need to think of a good second-level folder: I suggest ‘style’ for this. Your colour folders could be as simple as ‘reds, blonde, whites’ or it could be as detailed as ‘reds – bright, reds – blood, reds – Irish’, but within that system you’ll need to remember which haircut is in which style.

OK, once you have your basic system built up, it’s time to start trying on, so hop onto a pose stand, pick a hairstyle folder in one inventory window, and have your new inventory organisation system in the other window.

Style sorting

One of the main things you need to do is determine if the actual style of hair suits you. This can be tricker than you might initially think. What doesn’t work with one skin and outfit might well work with another. If you have hairstyles like this (crazy couture ones, for instance, or wild futuristic ones) then consider another sub-folder to your hair folder. You might want to call it something like ‘specialist hair’ or something like that.

Basically, this bit needs no screencaps. Just try on one neutral colour (a brown shade is usually good) in each style. If you go ‘yuck!’ right off the bat, then the style can be ditched (or archived if you’re a packrat who never throws anything away. Yes, Mar, I’m looking at you!). If you’re undecided, try on a few more colours. That deep indigo style might work brilliantly for your space roleplay avatar, or something like that.

You might want to keep a notebook to hand, to jot down anything you’ll need to refer to when you’re filing later on, especially with the specialist hairs that may only work with a particular look.

Have a ‘to be archived’ folder in your second inventory window and drag across all the folders you’re not keeping, as you work through them (or, if you’re feeling brave, just delete them!)

Colour Sorting

Mar is going to work with the freebie Adena hair from Amacci. First, she created folders by store (her top-level folders), then inside those her sub-folder is by colour. So, to that end, here are her colour folders:

If your chosen style has streaked or tipped versions, then make a sub-folder within the sub-folders (!), so you have Blondes > Blondes (streaked), etc.

Now, in the general hair inventory window, we open up that style’s folder. Many of the colours’ eventual locations we can guess from their names (although, if your chosen hair designer is one of those with fiendishly obscure names for hair then you’ll be in for a long trying-on session here!)

From that we can drag across known colours: ash blond and golden blond both go into the ‘blondes’ folder, for example:

Rather than having separate folders for black and white hair colours, Mar has chosen to have a simple Monochromes folder. Into this she’s going to put blacks, whites, greys, and also those monochrome shades that have just a hint of another colour (midnight and pearl shades, for example).

She’s going to sub-divide her colours folders. Here, we have folders for different types of red:

And here she’s trying on brown shades to determine if they’re light or dark. She also created a top-level folder for auburns, because – to me – those don’t fit in either red or brown:

The ‘exotics’ folder holds all the crazy colours. Some of them Mar might wear in the future, but something like this? I very much doubt it ;)

And here’s an enormous composite image to show you the final, filed result:

From that, I can try on all the browns and decide which if the lights I want to keep and which I’ll archive. Often, you’ll find three or four colours that only vary very slightly in shade, so just pick the one that works best and archive the rest.

By the way, if you’re really lucky, your chosen hair store might have included a time-saving swatch image in with the hair packs, like this:

Mar has gone pretty deep with her colour-sorting here, but you don’t need to go that far. As I stated at the beginning of this post: your inventory is personal to you. You’re the one that has to navigate it every day, so make it make sense to you! Mar’s just giving you some pointers here.

This one’s going to be an ongoing slog, I know. But do it little and often – a folder here and a folder there – and you’ll soon start to see some order. And, when you’re buying new hair, organise it right away! Get into good habits and your inventory will thank you for it. And you’ll never be at a loss when it comes to those Best in Mauve contests again ;)

Update: AK has a great suggestion in the comments. Create a ‘go-to’ hair folder and place in it your favourite styles in the colour that you wear the most. You can add an extra space after the exclamation point, to make it the top folder in your main hair folder. And don’t forget: if you use a viewer that supports it, make use of the ‘paste as link’ option, to save extra copies of the hair from cluttering up your inventory :)