Voila

well, whatayaknow. look what i found!

don't know how long it's been there or if it's documented on any blog, but it's everything i've been wanting. accept for the body variables, it's supposed to save all your 3rd party makeup and skin appliers in Catwa's "Bento Textures Presets HUD". of course, just so you're keeping up you will find it in your inventory as "CATWA HUD Bento Preset Textures".

i've yet to try it so i'll give you my impressions soon as i do. fingers crossed it does what it says.

Catwa announced it 6may17 on her flickr post.
updated to eye applier fix 1oct17 or apr18, who knows? her site is not something to find dates on.

...another day...

so, for example, i have an eye makeup applier that covers the brow and eye "layers" of the CATWA head. Lona if you wanna know. i've saved it in the top row left column.

referring to any particular spot on the supplied grid of 3 columns x 7 rows is gonna be a trial to recall what's what. nonetheless, let's see what happens when i change to a test face with a test texture pattern applied to brows, eyes, lips, & blush sections. that one i saved in the 3,7 spot. clicking it gives us:

that's not exactly what i painted. the brows have the texture test pattern but are not white, as the texture, correctly applied on all the other layers shows. i suspect there's been a tint applied, so open the CATWA Master HUD and see what's there.

 apparently, for whatever reason, a dark tint's been definitely applied on the lower (left segment of the brow icon in the HUD). while it's not shown, both the lower and upper brows had the same tint. changing them back to white may have the proper effect.

i'll save that result to the same last spot for testing and see if it sticks.

and, indeed it did.

now i'll apply the first saved preset and see what we get.

PERFECT!

now comes the hard part. should i ever want to know what makeup designer and design has been applied, i'm out of luck.

i won't lie, this tool is mighty close to giving us everything necessary to retrieve the look. the little face icon doesn't give any information about the appliers. i suppose i'll have to come up with an idea to get those sorted. until then it's still writing up the individual designer's product into a notecard.