FFXIV Glamour Guide: Plates, Prisms, and Dressing Your Character

Glamour is the system that lets you change how your gear looks without messing with the stats underneath. Other games call it transmog. If you've ever watched a high-level tank sprint past in a swimsuit and wondered how that even works, this is how. The whole thing unlocks early, costs close to nothing once you know the tricks, and turns into a side hobby for a lot of players. So here's how it all fits together, from that first quest to building full outfits you can swap with one click.

Unlocking the Glamour System

You can get glamour going at level 15, which is pretty early. The quest is called "If I Had a Glamour," and it's a side quest, not part of the main story, so you won't stumble into it by accident. Head to Vesper Bay in Western Thanalan and look for an NPC named Swyrgeim at about X:12.6, Y:14.3. Vesper Bay is that little outpost near the Horizon ferry, west of Ul'dah.

The quest itself is almost a joke. Swyrgeim wants a drink. Walk over to the Merchant & Mender right there in Vesper Bay, buy some Blood Orange Juice for a handful of gil, and hand it over. That's the whole thing. For your trouble you get the Cast Glamour action, 12 Glamour Prisms to start with, and a Green Beret. Not bad for buying someone a beverage.

There's an alternate version too. If you're hanging out in Mor Dhona, a Miqo'te named Wiscard at Revenant's Toll gives a quest called "A Self-improving Man" that does the exact same thing. Pick whichever one you happen to be closer to. They're mutually exclusive, so you only get to run one.

One thing to keep in mind: you need the Cast Glamour action before you can touch the Glamour Dresser or do much of anything fashion-related. So even though the quest feels throwaway, it's the gate for all of it. Knock it out as soon as you hit 15 and you'll never have to think about it again.

Glamour Prisms and How Applying Works

What a glamour prism actually does

Glamour Prisms are the little catalyst items the game burns every time you project one piece of gear's looks onto another. Here's the core idea. You've got an item with the stats you want to keep, and an item with the look you want to show. Cast Glamour takes the appearance and stamps it onto the stat item. One prism gets used up per cast.

To do it, open the subcommand menu on the item you're actually wearing for its stats, pick "Cast Glamour," and then choose the appearance item from the list. After that the appearance piece binds to you, and you're free to toss it or stash it away. There are some rules, naturally. The two items have to fill the same slot, the projected piece has to be something your job, race, and gender can actually wear, and the appearance item's equip level can't be higher than the base item's. So you can't slap a level-90 coat onto a level-30 chestpiece. Weapons have to match your job too.

Where to get prisms

This is where people waste money without realizing. Prisms are dirt cheap if you buy them the right way.

• Grand Company Quartermaster is the move for most players. Each prism costs 200 Company Seals, and you need the Chief Sergeant rank. If you've been turning in old gear at your GC, you probably have seals sitting around doing nothing. Spend those first.
• Gil vendors in every major city sell them for 500 gil apiece. Bango Zango in Limsa Lower Decks, Maisenta in Gridania, Roarich in Ul'dah, Tataroga in Mor Dhona, Tokohana in Kugane. Fine in a pinch, but the seal route is basically free by comparison.
• Market Board works too, since prisms are tradable, though the price floats around. Sometimes crafters dump them cheap, sometimes they're marked up. Check before you buy a stack.
• Bicolor Gemstone vendors in the Shadowbringers zones sell them for 6 gemstones each if you've got spare gems from FATEs.
• Crafting them is an option if you've leveled a crafter. Every Disciple of the Hand except Culinarian can make them at level 15. You need one Clear Prism (200 gil from a vendor) plus a couple class mats and some crystals. Decent if you're already crafting anyway.

A bit of history (and why it's easy now)

Prisms used to be a headache. There were seven different crafter types and five grade levels, so 35 total prism types, and you had to match the right one to your gear. Patch 4.2 back in early 2018 squashed all that into a single universal Glamour Prism. So nowadays there's just the one kind. Don't worry about grades or crafter classes at all.

Removing glamour

If you change your mind, that's what Glamour Dispellers are for. Keep one in your bag and a "Remove" option shows up in the Cast Glamour menu. Dispellers run 200 GC seals or 500 gil from the usual vendors. For dye mistakes there's a separate item called Terebinth, which comes up in the dye section below.

The Glamour Dresser and Plates

This is the part that takes glamour from "fiddly per-item" to "actually fun." Cast Glamour on its own is fine for a single piece, but once you want full outfits you can swap around, the Glamour Dresser is the whole point.

Where to find the dresser

Glamour Dressers live in inn rooms. Every city has one: the Drowning Wench in Limsa Lominsa, the Carline Canopy in Gridania, the Quicksand in Ul'dah. The expansion cities carry them too, like the Forgotten Knight in Ishgard and the Shiokaze Hostelry in Kugane. Just talk to the innkeep, rent a room, and the dresser is in there. You need the Cast Glamour action unlocked before you can use it.

How the dresser works

Think of the dresser as a big wardrobe. You put gear into it and the game converts each piece into a glamour you can reuse over and over. Loading an item in costs one Glamour Prism, but after that you can slap it onto anything as many times as you like. No more prism costs, no more hunting the item down later. The dresser holds 800 items, which sounds like a lot until you've been playing for a few years.

It also talks to the Armoire, a separate free storage for event and achievement gear that doesn't count against your 800 slots. A couple of capacity notes, since this trips people up. The dresser and plates showed up in patch 4.2 back in January 2018 with 200 slots and 10 plates. The limits have crept up since: 400 slots in Shadowbringers, 800 slots as of patch 6.2, and the plate count hit 20 in patch 6.1. So right now you're looking at 800 dresser slots and 20 plates. Nothing has moved on those numbers in Dawntrail, even though players keep asking for more.

Glamour Plates: the part that makes it fun

A plate is basically a saved full outfit. You open "Edit Glamour Plates" at the dresser, fill in the slots for head, body, hands, legs, feet, and so on using items you've stored, dye them however you want, and save the whole thing as one numbered plate. Then, instead of casting glamour piece by piece, you just apply the plate and your entire look swaps in one go.

Here's the best part. Applying a plate costs zero prisms. Nothing. You can flip between all 20 plates as much as you want and it never costs a thing. The only prism you ever pay is the one-time cost to load each item into the dresser in the first place. This is the single biggest money-saver in the whole system, and a lot of new players never even realize it's there.

You can also link a plate to a gear set. Set that up once, and every time you switch to that gear set, your glamour comes along automatically. Really handy if you swap between jobs a lot.

Where you can apply plates

For a long time you could only apply plates inside cities, the Gold Saucer, residential areas, and inns. Patch 6.1 loosened that up. Now you can apply them in any Sanctuary area, which is anywhere you get that rested-EXP bonus. That covers basically everywhere except inside duties, so for practical purposes you can change your outfit whenever you're out in the world.

One heads-up on the Dawntrail additions. Patch 7.1 brought in Outfit Glamours, which let you store a whole matching gear set as a single dresser slot instead of one slot per piece. Great for stretching that 800-slot limit. The catch is that storing an outfit wipes any dyes you had on it, so you'll redo those once it's on a plate. A small price for the space.

Dyes and Where to Get Them

Glamour is half the job. Color is the other half. The dye system is simple once it's unlocked, but the unlock is easy to miss because it's a separate quest from the glamour one.

Unlocking dyeing

Head right back to Swyrgeim in Vesper Bay. At level 15 she offers a quest called "Color Your World," and yep, it's another fetch job. Buy some Orange Juice from the Merchant & Mender nearby, bring it to her, and you get the Dye action. There's a tiny follow-up called "Simply to Dye For" that's mostly flavor. Swyrgeim really has the monopoly on fashion unlocks, apparently.

Once you've got the Dye action, you can dye any dyeable piece of gear anywhere, anytime. No special location needed.

Standard dyes: cheap and everywhere

The everyday dyes are called Standard Spectrum Dyes, and there are roughly 120 of them, covering most basic colors. They run about 216 gil each from dye merchants. Unsynrael in Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks is the one people usually go to, but there are dye merchants in every city. You can also craft them with any crafter at level 30, or buy them cheap from the ARR beast tribe vendors like the Amalj'aa, Kobold, Sahagin, Sylph, and Ixali. For most outfits, the standard set is all you'll ever need.

The premium blacks and whites

Here's where a common mix-up happens. People talk about wanting "black and white dyes" and assume the cheap ones will do. They're not the ones everyone's after. Soot Black, for example, is just a standard dye that costs 216 gil. The dyes that actually cause wallet damage are Pure White Dye and Jet Black Dye. Those have deeper, richer tones, and they've turned into the status-symbol colors of the game.

Want one of those? Here's the trick.

• Mog Station (cash shop): About a dollar each, or around $7.50 for a pack of ten. These versions are untradable, so they're only useful on your own character.
• Calamity Salvager: Trade one Gold Chocobo Feather each. Feathers come from the veteran rewards and recruit-a-friend program, so not really a renewable source.
• General-purpose (tradable) versions: These drop randomly from Quick Exploration retainer ventures, deep dungeons, field operations, the Island Sanctuary, and Fêtes. They're sellable on the Market Board, which is how most players get them with gil.

Prices on the Market Board bounce around a lot depending on your datacenter and the week. Rather than quoting a number that'll be stale by the time you read this, pull up universalis.app, search for Pure White Dye or Jet Black Dye, and check the going rate on your own server. That'll tell you whether it's a save-up purchase or a casual one.

Newer spectrum dyes

There are a couple of fancier dye categories added over time. Wide Spectrum #1 has around nine richer shades like Ruby Red, Pearl White, and Gunmetal Black, bought with Skybuilders' Scrips from the Firmament (100 scrips), Seafarer's Cowries from the Island Sanctuary (500), or Cosmocredits from Cosmic Exploration (600). Wide Spectrum #2 covers brighter neon and metallic tones off the same Cosmic Exploration track. Nice to have, not something you need right away.

Undoing a dye

Messed up the color? Use Terebinth. It strips the dye off an item and returns it to its default color, and you can dye it again right after. Terebinth is sold by the same dye merchants for cheap. Different from a Glamour Dispeller, which removes a whole glamour projection rather than just the color.

Building Outfits Without Breaking the Bank

Glamour gets a reputation for being a gil sink, and it can be, but only if you let it. Once you know where the free and cheap stuff comes from, putting together sharp-looking outfits costs almost nothing. Here's the practical playbook.

Let Glamour Plates do the heavy lifting

This deserves repeating because it's the whole game. Load your pieces into the dresser once, paying one prism per item, build them into plates, and then apply those plates forever for free. The beginner mistake is using Cast Glamour directly on equipped gear over and over, which burns a prism every single time. Plates exist specifically to stop that. Build the outfit once and you're done paying.

Spend Company Seals, not gil

If you take one tip from this section, make it this. Grand Company Seals buy prisms at 200 each, and seals pile up fast from turning in old gear and doing your daily supply and provisioning missions. Most people end up sitting on tens of thousands of seals with nothing good to spend them on. Convert those into prisms and you'll basically never pay gil for glamour again. Same goes for Glamour Dispellers at 200 seals.

Lean on the Armoire

The Armoire is free infinite storage for certain event, achievement, and veteran-reward gear, and it feeds straight into your Glamour Plates without using dresser space. Any time you pick up gear from a seasonal event or an achievement, check whether it's storable in the Armoire. If it is, store it there instead of the dresser. It's still available for plates, just not eating one of your 800 slots. Over a year of events, that saves a ton of room.

Free and cheap gear sources

You don't need the Market Board to look good. Plenty of strong glamour options are free or close to it.

• Grand Company gear looks decent and costs only seals.
• Dungeon drops you've outleveled make great glamour, so run old dungeons for the look.
• Tomestone gear from endgame vendors, once you're done with it for stats.
• Gold Saucer (MGP) gear, bought with the points you earn from minigames. Some of the flashiest outfits in the game come from here, and they cost zero gil.
• Beast tribe gear, unlocked by grinding reputation with each tribe. Distinct looks you can't really get elsewhere.
• Seasonal event gear, handed out free every year and usually Armoire-storable.
• Achievement gear from the achievement certificate vendor.

Use Outfit Glamours for full sets

If you grabbed the Dawntrail patch 7.1 feature, Outfit Glamours let you stash a whole matching set as one dresser slot. Got a full artifact armor set you love? Store it as an outfit instead of nine separate pieces. The dye-wipe on storage is annoying, but the space savings are worth it, especially once your dresser starts filling up.

The Aesthetician for finishing touches

Not strictly glamour, but worth a mention since it finishes the look. Jandelaine the Aesthetician handles hairstyles, face paint, and tattoos. Unlock him at level 15 with the quest "Beauty Is Only Scalp Deep" from S'dhodjbi in Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks (X:11.1, Y:11.0), which needs the "Call of the Sea" main story quest done first. Once unlocked, ring any Crystal Bell in an inn to summon him. Sessions run 2,000 gil after your first free one. Most hairstyles themselves drop from dungeons and raids or come from the Gold Saucer, so they're a separate collection project.

The short version: unlock glamour and dyes at level 15, buy prisms with Company Seals, load your favorite pieces into the dresser once, build them into plates you can apply for free forever, and raid the Armoire, Gold Saucer, and seasonal events for outfits. Do that and you'll have a sharp-looking character without ever touching the expensive end of the Market Board.