spore savant face markings, not meant for dunmer...
I have been OBSESSED with the spore savant face markings for months now, trying to get all components of the antiquity to finally unlock them, and after realizing (almost too late) that the infinite archive has the piece i'd been missing, i finally got ahold of my beloved mushroom makeup.
However,
I wanted this mushroom makeup for my dunmer... This is what she normally looks like (in this with the 'eyes of the scamp' contacts).
As you can see, she has dark dunmeri skin in warm medium greys. The spore savant face markings, which in lore are dunmer markings made for dunmer mushroom-mages, are NOT designed for characters with dark skin.
OBSERVE:
"What's the problem" You may be thinking. Well let's just spell it out for you, rather than getting a close look there at the weird light outlines, by showing how these markings look on my altmer:
looks fine.
ALSO, all the people who were putting up previews of what the spore savant head markings looked like only showed them on white humans and altmer (whose darkest skin tones are still unfortunately extremely light like my boy up there). For example, uesp shows a beautiful image of these markings having gorgeous orange and deep browns in them on their character. Am I blaming any of these preview people for only showing the markings on one single skintone? NO. Besides, 'eso.mmo-fashion' was the only place I could find that used to show these things on multiple species but that site no longer updates.
So why do these markings look like nice face art on light skin, but festering open sores on my dark-skinned dunmer? Because of transparency! Zos has been making a lot of body art items transparent, which looks nice on light skin, but horrendous (if it shows up at all) on dark skin. For this one in particular, as my sister pointed out "It's like they did the opposite of what you're supposed to do and made the lighter orange solid and the brown transparent".
It really feels as though zos went out of their way to make these markings look ugly on dark skin.
which is eXTRA wild considering they're markings BY elves with darker skin, FOR elves with darker skin.