A Vitiligo Skin Feature Is Coming To The Latest ‘Sims’ Game With Help From Winnie Harlow

For video game lovers, The Sims has been a cultural favorite, allowing players to create and control virtual people in their own little suburban world since 2000, making it one of the best-selling PC games ever. To continue that success, updates have been made over the years to continue to keep the simulation game both relevant and also representative of the people who play it. With that in mind, as of today, The Sims 4 has included a vitiligo skin feature, giving players the chance to create a character with these patches.

For those who have the game already, this feature can be found in the Create-A-Sim skin details after an update. The patches come in different sizes and patterns across the body and you can choose the placement on the face, torso, arms and legs. The way the patches look is based on research, as developers found that they can have clear edges or dark irregular ones and affected skin can appear white as well as pink compared to the shade of surrounding skin. All in all, developers created 61 vitiligo variants. So as you flip through the shades of your prospective character, you can see the vitiligo adjust to its skin tone. It’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

To help roll out this game-changing update, The Sims 4 team is partnering with supermodel and entrepreneur Winnie Harlow, who has vitiligo and has been at the forefront of empowering other people who have it since stepping on the scene via America’s Next Top Model in 2014. Having this feature in the game means a lot to Harlow, for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, like the nostalgia from her own love of playing The Sims when she was growing up. She’s created a dream home for the latest iteration that players can download, and they can also play with a Sim inspired by her.

“It’s magical to see The Sims 4 team introduce this new vitiligo feature,” Winnie said. “As a
child, I spent a lot of time playing The Sims and I think it’s so beautiful to be able to represent
your true self in-game. This partnership is a powerful statement encouraging players to embrace what makes them unique – both in-game and in real life.”

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The vitiligo feature furthers the efforts of The Sims developers to mirror the diversity of players. We also see this update furthering the success of The Sims 4, which is already the most widely played game in the history of the franchise.