

And I don't think the latest patches affect or modify this. And this is something that's been there since the first release of skyrim. This shadow is apparent on many npc characters too such as Ysolda, when you have her face backlit. You also notice the same shadow property cast on other parts of the character as well: legs, back of body (especially the middle section), etc, which only seems to happen under backlit conditions. The shadow comes to an abrupt stop at the lower neck area (just above collarbone), creating what seems to be a body and face color mismatch. If we face our character's face towards the sun, everything seems pretty normal, however, if we face her away from the sun (backlighting), she gets a greyish/greenish shadow highlight cast on the face and neck.

However, I think what you're experiencing isn't an issue at all, but simply the way skyrim casts shadow and highlights on characters under backlighting conditions. In vanilla skyrim, there's very little texture difference between the face and body, though if you look very closely you do notice a slight difference in color and textural quality. If getting those out of my system doesn't help, the only thing left is to hunt through every friggin' folder and file on my friggin' computer for the a**hole of a file that's dicking with my game. There's no way on earth I'm deleting those, but I honestly have no place to put 11 gb ^^' The only thing I can think of is the two folders sitting on my desktop, holding my old saves and edited plugins. Every single mod set that was supposed to eliminate neck seams (and according to hundreds of people, did the job flawlessly) was still subject to this nonsense. Resigning myself to brief defeat, I implemented a number of body, head, and skin mods. I've installed on different drives, updated my video card, defragmented, cleaned, and error-checked my drives, uninstalled and reinstalled the CK, disabled and cleaned out Steam Cloud, and removed everything that could ever possibly be related to the game, including NMM and Boss and Wrye Bash and Et cetera, just for good measure. If steam had a bad copy on their server, wouldn't everyone installing have this? >_< I've found threads as early as last June trying to resolve this problem, but they all die out with no solution.

I haven't played in weeks Xaihady's sitting at Heljarchen with a discolored head and missing me :'( My gosh, it's such a rare problem, it's almost relieving to find someone else who's dealing with this.
