You can’t save the world if you don’t look cute, and Final Fantasy XIV’s vanity system ensures you can look as cute as you want, whenever you want.
How, you ask? Simple: check your character menu. There, players can find a tab labeled glamour plates. Glamour plates are cosmetic ensembles that can be saved and applied over any equipped gearset, making changing your character’s appearance as simple as opening the menu and choosing which glamour plate to apply.
However, glamour plates and their limitations aren’t well-explained in-game. Here’s how they work and what you can and can’t do with them.
The Inn Room
Before you can start making glamour plates, make sure you have glamour unlocked and glamour prisms in your inventory.
Once that’s done, visit an inn and enter the inn room. Players can find an inn at any one of the game’s major cities: Gridania, Ul’dah, Limsa Lominsa, Ishgard, Kugane, or the Crystarium. Every inn room has a glamour dresser—interact with it to begin creating or editing your glamour plates.
If you’ve never made a glamour plate before, the first thing you’ll need to do is store some cosmetics within the dresser. Choose an equipable item from the inventory dropdown on the righthand side of the screen and accept the prompt to put it in the dresser. Doing so will consume a glamour prism, but the item will be preserved in the dresser and can be retrieved at any time.
Note that you can only put items that are at 100% durability into the dresser. If you want to glamour gear that you have recently worn, make sure to stop by a mender or repair it yourself before rushing to the inn room.
Creating Your Glamour Plate
Once you have a handful of items stored in your dresser, click a plate number to create or edit an outfit ensemble. One limitation of the glamouring system is that you can’t use equipment that has a higher item level than what you’re wearing as glamour; for example, if your equipped footwear has an item level of 45, you can’t glamour a piece of equipment with a higher item level over it.
When you dye an item in a glamour plate, that item will stay dyed unless you delete your glamour plate or change said item for another glamour piece. Rather than immediately dyeing an item, players will be given the prompt to “reflect” dye. Reflecting doesn’t consume a unit of dye until you save the glamour plate, and you’ll have plenty of chances to back out if you’re not ready to commit to a color.
But Wait, There’s More
Glamour plates can only be applied in major cities or large settlements like the Gold Saucer, Idyllshire, and Rhalgr’s Reach. Furthermore, glamour items from other classes cannot be applied over equipment pieces from another class. For example, Aiming equipment cannot be glamoured over an equipped Maiming set; if parts of your glamour plate can be worn by any class, they will be successfully transferred but otherwise, the affected glamour pieces just won’t apply.
Additionally, one set of equipment cannot have two glamours saved over it. For instance, if you’re using the same equipment for two crafting classes, only one glamour can be used on that equipment even if that equipment is being used by two different glamour sets.
