As I was wandering around SL again on one of my infrequent visits, I noticed that The Secret Store no longer says that their clothing includes a flat chest option -- instead they specifically mention it's designed for "V-Tech Flat Chest". Immediately I had to find out what that was, and a quick Google search lead me to Valentine Technologies, which designs a flat chest to fit the Maitreya Laura body. As I've noted before, this is one of the most popular mesh bodies in Second Life, and really, really well designed. It's quite natural that people who want a mesh body for an effeminate boy character would want to work from a base like Maitreya Laura, so this flat chest conversion was pretty exciting. I had to check it out immediately.
What the V-Tech attachment does is pretty clever. It works like a clothing attachment that meshes with your body perfectly, and can be skinned with the same skin as the rest of the body using omega appliers. So in order to do this, I needed to shell out 499.00 linden for the flat chest attachment itself, and then 99.00 linden (50,00 linden in-game with a 15 linden Omega Support Group membership), and then I needed to find a skin and applies to make it all work. I already have a Pink Fuel skin with flat-chest options, but I wanted a new skin anyway, so I headed over to Pink Fuel first. The V-Tech recommends them or Sugar Pill, but actually at Pink Fuel I found that they also carry V-Tech Boi chest converters for The Sugar Garden and Glam Affair, so that gives you four different skin makers to work with.
I decided after some shopping to pick up a TSG (The Sugar Garden) Baby skin, which was, I forget, about 800.00 lindens? It seemed reasonable, but of course I also needed an applier for the Maitreya body and then the V-Tech chest applier. I wound up grabbing the one from Pink Fuel designed for TSG skins, but TSG also had boi chest option appliers in their shop that probably would have worked just as well. I got the impression that the Pink Fuel had four options (regular, soft, atheletic, ripped) and the TSG option had only two (regular and soft), but since I need to match the top half of the body with the bottom half I'm kind of limited to the two options TSG has for the Maitreya body anyway. I didn't explore this enough to figure out if I could get a ripped look for my entire chest, upper and lower.
Here's what I ended up with. The skin tone isn't quite perfect between the boi top and the rest of the body, but I'm not sure why. Maybe because I bought the Pink Fuel Boi Chest applier instead of just getting the Sugar Garden Boi Chest applier to begin with.
However this is miles ahead of anything I had previously! A Maitreya mesh body with a flat chest -- who can complain?
One thing I discovered, and you can see it in the above picture, is that with the ultra-pretty, little-girl look of the Sugar Garden skin (which admittedly is what attracted me to them, and I specifically picked the Baby skin as the most girlish/childish in appearance to my eye, and with a name like Baby it's probably meant to be exactly that), when you combine that face with the girlish pigtails that I have and a flat chest -- well, the result is not so much a very pretty boi but a young girl. That wasn't actually my intention, although I wanted a very girlish boy. Kellyeden has almost always been very pretty and very girlish so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised.
V-Tech Flat Boi Chest for Maitreya Laura
Omega Applier System
The Sugar Garden Blog
Pink Fuel Tumbler Blog
Another clever thing that thee V-Tech chest does is that it turns off the chest sliders. This helps fitmesh clothing designed for a Maitreya body with breasts to fit better without doing the concave chest thing. You may find that quite a lot of Maitreya clothing will work for your flat-chested boi. As examples:
This is a Lakshmi Orla Dress in pink and blue plaid, designed for the Maitreya body. The chest doesn't lay completely flat but it still looks pretty good on my flat-chested character.
The top is one of the group gifts you can pick up from Blueberry. As you can see from the first picture, there's a small gap between the top and the chest. But really it looks quite good over all -- doesn't look weird, that's the main thing. You can wear it and most people aren't going to notice that it's not perfectly flat.
(Pictures taken at Chelsea by the Sea, Balamb Garden.)
Next question is: who makes clothing specifically for a flat-chested Maitreya body?
You won't be surprised that the answer is: not many, and they're the usual suspects that I've run into before.
Fist of all, we have The Secret Store, which sent me on this quest in the first place. On the downside they develop new outfits at the rate of about one a month (usually for Collabor88), so it will take quite a while before the majority of their store contains items that work with a flat-chested Maitreya body. On the positive side, they DO create new outfits every month, and they always include the flat chest option / VTech Flat Chest option, so the clothing fits perfectly. The above dress is their Rebecca Flare Dress, and the red jumper is their Agnes Playsuit, both very cute!
(Pictures taken at the Blind Pig, Balamb Garden, and at Rustic Retreat, DYNASTIC CITY.)
Valentine Tech makes a small selection of tops, dresses, and outfits designed for the flat chested Maitreya Boi. The above is their V-Tech Tank Top v2.0 - Boi Chest, which can be colored with quite a few different coloring options, including a black and white see-through mesh if you want. (The shorts are Addams Sienna ripped shorts.)
I had almost forgotten about G. Field. From what I can tell the store hasn't changed much in at least the last year, although I found a Winter Princess dress with a Maitreya body option, which is a sign that this was added more recently than most of their standard-sized clothing. The cool thing about them though is that they have a lot of standard-sized flat chest options, and I found that quite a few of these worked for me. I had some of this already, of course. ^_^ But I bought the pink Off-shoulder Aurora dress and Posy Scalloped boots in pink above this time around. The black bibbed dress I had before, that's their Karen Bib Dress in black. (The stockings are from Blueberry btw, and those shoes I keep showing are Tokyo Girl Keiki Janes.)
Panties!
I found that quite a few of the dresses I was wearing required something for modesty's sake. The Maitreya body has an underwear layer option of course, and that's probably your best option since it won't poke through clothing, but layers are kind of a pain to deal with -- you have to set it to a specific layer, and then you have to change it if you want to wear something different. So I went looking for some mesh underwear that I could wear beneath a dress with few problems.
I found some good options at Asteria. The white panties are their Lisa Panties; the black are from the Lia mini dress with panties, and the red Nomi harness top and panties really doesn't work as well for what I went searching for, but I liked it and it worked pretty well with the flat chest so I picked it up.
These LiX cotton panties come in six different textures (there's a HUD). They seem like a nice option too.
Dead Dollz has some nice stuff. The flowered bloomer panties in the very first picture are from them, but they have things that would work better for under a skirt.
If you want mesh panties, anyway. Good layer-based panties work fine as I said.
Unless, of course, you want to make certain people know you're a boy. Then you have limited options, but the bikini that V-Tech sells can work well.
