New 7.1 hairstyle looks nothing like the winning hairstyle from the 2023 contest

[romanh0liday]

chiming in to include my disappointment.

square enix needs to do better and do justice to this hair style. while were at it, include more natural hair, curls, and locs in general. there is much in the way of straight hair options. more textured hair, please.

[bruiseberry]

this whole situation is wild. the design won for a reason, why on earth wouldn't they put it in the game how it's supposed to be designed?

i don't think it would be this upsetting if it was a random hairstyle introduced, but the fact that it's a changed up fan-made hairstyle is... let me just say it's weird, to put it lightly.

c'mon squenix, you're better than this, i hope.

[YamaLove]

It is flat out unacceptable that one of the only black inspired hair styles that won this contest is reduced to this. I am sorry but this isn't even "inspired by" this is flat out changed. I hold a large amount of respect for all the teams that work on ffxiv, and I honestly want to believe this is a fluke, but this needs to be changed. Not only is it poorly textured, you as well used the lowest quality take you could have possibly gave us to try to distract us from the fact this is supposed to be curly hair.
If you want this hair in the game, fine, add it. But please add a version of the hair that is closer to the contest winner, you have so much talent and skill on this team I know for a fact you can do it.
Dawntrail is all about people being proud of their culture and heritage, let people be proud as their character. Let textured hairs be textured, not this flat sea weeded mess.

[SolArturia]

"inspired by" is doing a lot of legwork lmao

i'm hoping they'll make changes to it to reflect the artist's actual art

[Skaadenfroid]

Chiming in with some, this is the first time I'm posting on the forums

This is incredibly shameful to depict a winning contribution in this manner.

It reeks of either implicit bias or just half-hearted laziness, which is a shame because they did such a great job with every other winner's pieces.

Normally I would be a lot more supportive of the dev team and say they'll fix it in time but I think they have an obligation to go back and fix this one. Hopefully they can crunch something in with the FRU release because this really isn't it.

[Gabye]

When I was looking at the patch notes I saw the hairstyles and was disappointed because I remembered the winner and thought "Oh they didn't put the curly hairstyle :C".
It isn't until now that I found out whatever it was I saw was the supposed "curly hairstyle".
Really disappointing...

[CodextheBoffin]

I literally had to make an account on the forums just to post my disappointment about how this hairstyle was created. It looks nothing like the winning entry and is sorely lacking in what people actually cared about it for: representation. The game is sorely lacking in curly or coiled hair, and that locks a good amount of people out of seeing their wols how they'd actually like to see them! Shame on Square Enix for this horrible, disappointing hair.

[SafaiaSnow]

Dev team I've seen you nail every hair style back-to-back. Y'all are way better than this.

Please, from the bottom of my heart, please redo it. Please do right by the creator and the people they absolutely made it for.

[Ethrya]

The artist's entry looked so nice and I know plenty of people were really excited about it! What happened? I'm sure something more accurate can be made. FFXIV is really lacking in textured and curly styles to reflect how many people's natural hair grows, let alone how many amazing ways there are of styling textured and curly hair. We just had an expansion about learning from and connecting with different cultures, so it's honestly kind of embarrassing that the diversity of choices available to create player characters is still so poor in comparison...

[Darkstride]

They also chose to showcase it in Crayola colors. I'm curious if it looks less playdoughy with more natural tones.