Opinions on anthro hair

[Frank Gulotta]

It's not a contentious topic, but could be a bit interesting

It can just be an esthetic preference, or an easy way to personnalize your character through hairstyle. But... WHO gets hair and WHO doesnt, and how does it work? is it hair that's longer and perhaps finer than fur?

I see it in general, in media, used to differentiate sexes, like in Arthur for instance. Females get hair while males are... technically bald I guess? There are few exceptions, like the Lion King where it's the reverse for obvious reasons (although I've heard male lions don't always have a mane, there are species where neither males nor females do), in this case sexes are differentiated through voice acting (duh)... and eyelashes, which just brings up more questions >.>
Other media, like Rock and Rule, have both males and females have hair.

So what's your opinion on it? everybody gets hair? only males/females get hair? or everyone goes "bald" (although not really because why call it bald if nobody is not bald)?

As for me I never took that topic seriously and when I draw, it's basically anarchy, I do what looks cool and try to explain it later so world building isn't too inconsistent.

 

[Deleted member 111470]

I don't like anthros with hair. It looks weird to me. Maybe short hair or just some fuzz, but straight up human hair, on an animal, doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Ghostbird]

I like hair on anthros but not ferals

 

[Infrarednexus]

I think it makes anthros look fabulous.

 

[Peach's]

and eyelashes, which just brings up more questions >.>

This one is hilarious to me, as in humans males have the longer eyelashes. The only reason for the perception that women have longer eyelashes is makeup. I do like the subversion of male cartoons with eyelashes, specifically I really dig the eyesidown eyelashes they put on fabulous males.

 

[HistoricalyIncorrect]

1) Take a wolf or any other mutt
2) Give him anime-like flashy hair

Done, basic sona completed.

Wile I do not mind hair on anthros, it is important factor will your sona be recognisable. I have encuntered 4 blue wolves which looked almost exactly the same and I thought its only one guy.
So yeah, they are alright... but nothing beats my fur hat

 

[Frank Gulotta]

1) Take a wolf or any other mutt
2) Give him anime-like flashy hair

Done, basic sona completed.

LOL true, that's basically everyone's first fursona. The starters pack.

 

[Frank Gulotta]

I think it makes anthros look fabulous.

Oh yeah, gotta be careful with it tho, no one likes an eyesore

 

[Frank Gulotta]

This one is hilarious to me, as in humans males have the longer eyelashes. The only reason for the perception that women have longer eyelashes is makeup

Makeup sounds like a good enough reason. But how does a lioness put on eye makeup with her large paws..? that's the question. Let's say she's royalty, maybe some small animal does it for her. But the female hyena...? does she, like, use tiny fragments of bones?

 

[Frank Gulotta]

I don't like anthros with hair. It looks weird to me. Maybe short hair or just some fuzz, but straight up human hair, on an animal, doesn't make sense to me.

Well, facial hair and head hair on most humans doesn't exactly look or feel the same. So why wouldn't anthropomorphic animals have something similar?

 

[Tyno]

Anthro hair is pretty cool more people should do it.

 

[TrishaCat]

I like hair on my anthros. Gives them more features and can make them look cuter in some cases.
As for who? Everyone!

 

[foussiremix]

Anthro hair looks good as long as its executed well.
Also the hairstyle needs to be creative

 

[Mayflower]

I prefer anthro characters to have hair like humans.

 

[Tendo64]

I greatly prefer hair on anthros. I feel like the design feels more bland without it, especially if it's something with a common design like red foxes or solid color wolves, and makes more possibility for design.

 

[Fallowfox]

Sometimes I prefer without.

 

[Jackpot Raccuki]

It kinda depends, I'm usually picky so I prefer not to have it.
Plus I suck ass at hair styles anyway so I usually don't give 'em any other than typical spiked hair or whatever.

I think there's only three characters that I've given a hair style to, but the 'hair' is the same colour as their fur, othewise my main fursona has the different colour hair in one art piece, but the others don't.
Either way, it's up to you, but generally if people wanna put hair on character's it's up to them, assuming if it's a character being commissioned it'd be nice to ask the owner's preference, but I generally don't mind anyway so long as it fits them.

 

[LeFay]

I think it really depends on the sona and the type of style you're going for. Some sonas look better with it and some without it.

A lot of it just comes down to personal preference. Personally I like sonas with hairstyles and a bit of flair to really set them apart.

 

[Keefur]

Anthro hair is pretty cool more people should do it.

Cutter Cat has hair. On a side note, after watching the cartoon, my moustache I grew as soon as I was able (about 1973). I never shaved it off until about 6 years ago, and that was only for the animal charity for Fangcon. I didn't realize how attached to it I had become until I actually had to shave it off. I immediately grew it back, however. Right now, I also sport a bit of a beard as well.

 

[quoting_mungo]

I think the only "right" way to handle human-style hair on anthropomorphic characters is "you do you." My fursona has human-esque hair because she's just how I draw myself in furry art - her not having my hair, piercings, or clothes (I typically draw her in clothing I do own, though there are exceptions) would just be weird to me. For the same reason, her hair color and style varies with mine.

In all-furry settings I tend to go for hair on most or all characters (and if only a few don't have human-style hair that can easily be explained with them having a personal preference for keeping it trimmed down), while I may lean a bit more towards not doing so when they are a separate race in a setting with humans present, depending. One big factor in this may be how much hair can show personality, and another that I am partly face blind (I don't suffer from full-blown face blindness, but I tend to recognize people by context, hair and clothes rather than face, and major changes in any of those can lead me to completely blank on who the fuck that person is, or walking right past someone I know well), so I'm kinda used to identifying people by their hair.

As for hair vs fur, my assumption would be that their texture and growth pattern differ. While I wouldn't necessarily compare that to head hair vs facial hair (facial hair is a weird case anyway), human head hair also doesn't resemble our body hair very much, and there's already examples in the animal kingdom of species with different/"separate" hair/fur growth on different parts of the body, including equines, lions, and probably other mammals as well that don't come to mind right now.

Though one of my least favorite design decisions with Friendship is Magic was the arbitrary pasting of human hairstyles onto ponies. For horses, I tend to go with hair/mane growing along the spine like in RL horses, and when I draw ponies I'll generally try to adapt whatever hairstyle they have to work with it growing out along the back of their neck. Funnily, a shaggy mop of hair on a four-legged dog/wolf/whatever doesn't bother me nearly so much.

This one is hilarious to me, as in humans males have the longer eyelashes. The only reason for the perception that women have longer eyelashes is makeup. I do like the subversion of male cartoons with eyelashes, specifically I really dig the eyesidown eyelashes they put on fabulous males.

I can't speak for whether what you say is true in the general. I can say that I have fucking fabulous lashes, and while my father has longer/denser lashes than many people, they don't measure up to mine. (Seriously, people think I'm wearing mascara. I've touched the stuff less than a handful of times in my life.) Totally anecdotal, but I find it an amusing illustration of how, if nothing else, individual cases may not conform to the general.

I do think that part of the stylistic shorthand of lashes on female characters is also mannerisms. If you look at many of the male characters that do get lashes, they are often coded as gay or the self-absorbed sort of gorgeous. Basically, the "fluttering eyelashes to woo men" trope requires lashes, so female characters get lashes. It's also possible that female (human) facial structure plays in - men tend to have more pronounced brows, so their lashes to a greater degree lie in shadow and may not be parsed as long due to that?

 

[TheCynicalViet]

For hair, I think it's a matter of personnel aesthetic preference. I'd recommend making it either a color that matches the fur or an "unnatural color" (dyed) except for characters that are naturally vibrant.

But no hair! That's interesting because the hair is just fur but having short fur is still hair. I wouldn't necessarily call it bald. I'd say it's more of a case of very short hair. Thinking bald really only applies when they're furless. I wouldn't be afraid to call a sphinx cat bald.

 

[Kinare]

As for the topic of "who gets hair" - do what you want? To me it's all fur when we're discussing animals. Whether by definition that's right or not, I could care less. That said, I joke and call my irl hair "my fur" sometimes just to be silly. Both of the characters in my pfp (one being my sona) have different "hair" styles and so do other characters in my world, but I still think of it as fur and not hair

 

[oappo]

I like everyone having hair. Hair is one of my favourite aspects of people in general when it comes to art. There's just so much you can do with it, especially for women.
I will say though that it's sort of easy to mess up hair and make it look weird or bad with anthropomorphic characters.

only males/females get hair?

Not a huge fan of this. Makes the bald sex boring compared to the hair one.

In general, I don't really mind "bald" or "fur hair". I think you need to put more thought into these designs so the overall quality is higher than furries with hair. That said I still think hair looks better.

 

[Nyro46]

I personally, am not a big fan of anthros having basically human hair on their head. The closest I could really allow (with my own characters, I mean) is something that looks maybe similar to human hair, but the colour still flows with the rest of their fur (or matches another colour on their fur) and the hair is still fur-like, and not like, actual human hair.
On my characters, I mostly just give them fringes/bangs (or manes if their species would have one). The colours always or almost always match some other colour on their body. They never have actual human hair, just fur, that may be a bit thicker on the top of the head. I guess I can show some examples.

I don't do it so often but the occasional character may have little to no fringe on top of the head. (Though the reason I don't do that often is because most of the time it can look weird to me, I think it's something to do with my art style?)

In saying that though, I have occasionally seen hair on anthros where it doesn't look super out of place or looks alright with the style. But generally, I prefer more fur-like "hair".

 

[Deleted member 132067]

I'm feeling divided. In the end, duh, it's a matter of personal preference like so many other things, the end. What I can say is that, despite me having picked the "have the sona have hair that is sort of it's own thing parallel to the actual fur"- route, I can say that approached like @Nyro46 and many others similar to him make more... Sense. It is admittedly very weird that for some reason, "hair-fur" grows entirely different than the rest. But that gets thrown into the artistic freedom pigeonhole, there's many more and even weirder things that can be done with a fursona. Allowing it to have a hairstyle for the sake of ignoring realistic fur growth is fine with me.