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Dress-Up & Avatars
Avatar makers and dress-up games, which are really just character creators liberated from the games they were trapped in. A whole subculture.
15 sites
A cheerful cartoon avatar generator in one fixed illustration style, endlessly recombined and free to use anywhere.
- <1 min
A straightforward cartoon portrait builder with vector output, useful for when a real profile photo is genuinely not an option.
- <1 min
The sister site, strong on anime and historical portrait makers, with an unreasonable and very welcome number of hair options.
- 10 min
Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.
An avatar library where you can dial through a dozen illustration styles and copy the result straight out as an image.
- <1 min
Hundreds of dress-up games covering mythology, history and fandoms, drawn by actual artists rather than an asset pipeline.
- 10 min
A directory that has been curating this genre since 2004, including a great many games nobody else bothered to archive.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
A superhero character creator with a costume parts library deep enough to have outlasted three separate web technologies.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A platform where creators publish their own dress-up games, which is largely how the genre survived the death of Flash.
- 10 min
A hand-drawn library of mix-and-match people, free for anything, and quietly the source of half the internet's illustrations.
A hand-drawn character builder in the Open Peeps style, producing an avatar that does not look machine-generated.
- <1 min
A Japanese platform hosting tens of thousands of illustrator-made avatar makers, each one in a completely different style.
A pastel multiplayer world whose real draw is the character creator, where people spend far longer than in the game itself.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The South Park character maker that has been running since 1999 and still gets updated with props from new episodes.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Millions of uploaded Minecraft skins plus an editor, which is the closest thing that game has ever had to a fashion scene.
- 2 min
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Dress-Up & Avatars: questions
How many sites are in Dress-Up & Avatars?
15 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 15 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
10 of 15 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 15 are safe for work and 15 work with the sound off.