How to change your appearance in Red Dead Online

How do you change your appearance in Red Dead Online? If you’re not feeling your current cowboy couture look, there’s a whole host of character customisation tools in Rockstar’s Western epic that can turn any baby-faced cowboy into a grizzly gunslinger in mere moments.

Long ago, in the dark days of a console-only Red Dead Redemption 2, you had to start an entirely new character to recreate your look, but Rockstar has since given players the ability to refresh their online avatar with various face and body options. Now you can change your appearance in RDR2 while keeping all of your progress and possessions, so here’s how to do it.

RDR2: how to change your appearance

Before you launch into the character customisation menus, make sure you’re in a safe place—you don’t want to be as unfortunate as Sacramento Stu (opens in new tab), trust me. This isn’t because you’ll freak out those in the world around you with your gross morphing face, but because going into the character creator screen removes you from the session and forces you to abandon what you’re currently doing. So find yourself a safe place; your camp is a great option.

Note: you can change your appearance for free, but only the first time. If you want to change again you’ll have to pay gold or real money out of your wallet, so make sure you’re absolutely happy with your creation before finalising things.

To get to the character creator screen, open the Free Roam menu, scroll down to Online Options, and scroll down to Change Appearance. In this menu, you have lots of ways to change your look. There are sixteen different ways to change your character including skin tone, age, body build, eye colour, eyebrow shape, jawline, and a more.

Rockstar’s character editor has some pretty in-depth options, like changing your characters ‘lifestyle’: complexion, blemishes, scars, and freckles, in other words. I can’t imagine a cowboy’s diet to be the most nutritional so this is a great opportunity to give your gunslinger a ‘naturally’ healthy glow.

You also have the option of changing your hairstyle and beard, but this is something that can also be changed outside of the character tool by going to see a barber. If you chose to be a female character you get the added bonus of makeup options. I totally recommend the winged eyeliner: it’s classy but sassy.