It's all too common to see dude-bros on the larger networks - and especially on inter-net connections, where they can reach audiences beyond their region who they will never meet - brag about how incredible they are at fleshworking, how they have perfectly toned their bodies through shaping themselves, and how they will teach you the deepest secrets for an exorbitant price. They're lying, of course, even if they don't fully know it and simply chose to perpetuate the scam they themselves fell for. They're barely even amateurs - their ability to sculpt themselves from the base of 'masculine macho-man' into 'hypermasculine macho-man' is the tiniest scratch upon the surface, little more than a party trick.
It's in the eyes.
It's always in the eyes.
The area around the eyes of a grifter like this appear visibly well-rested, free of bags, absent of circles, as though they have slept a perfect eight hours a night for every night of their lives. But it's all appearance, just like everything else with these sorts - if you look deeper, you see that there is a certain emptiness in their gaze, the vacant and insubstantial overconfidence of a beginner who believes the universe to be at their fingertips.
No, if you're a novice fleshworker seeking to finally reach beyond simply making yourself look stronger or change your eye color for fifteen minutes for entertainment value, when you run into a true fleshwork master - and you will, for they are everywhere - their eyes (provided they have kept theirs) will look like they haven't slept for a week straight, deeply shadowed. They could easily clear this away - in fact, it would probably be easier to simply wipe them off than to keep them through all the changes - but to the fleshworkers who bear them, they are a symbol of something very personal.
All true fleshworkers will, at some point in their study, strike upon a crack in the identity they'd built up around themselves for most of their lives, and realize that they have become someone different - someone new - and that it has become time to cast aside who they have been until then, like a snake shedding its skin. At this point, they embark on their 'longest night', a complete tearing apart and rebuilding of who they are, both physically and mentally. It often takes at least a week straight for those who stay mostly human; for others that change themselves into other classically living things, it may last months; for the few who transform into locations, whose souls turn into those of a street or a lake or a hill or a forest or a temple, it can be the work of years. And it is sleepless, hungry work - all fleshworkers alter their bodily functions for the occasion to not require sleep for as long as they can manage, and they must rely on whatever food and drink they have in supply as sustenance (it's for this reason that longest nights are often embarked on in groups, so that they can all provide for each other).
When the long arduous work is done and their magnum opus is complete, when the old self is scattered across the floor in tattered shreds of dead skin and shards of bone and spats of dried blood and gasps of faded memory, their renewed body always collapses immediately for a long slumber. When they awake - whatever that means for them, in their new shape - they bear all the hallmarks of staying awake for such a long, long time.
And they always choose to keep them. It means so much to who they are now, this eternal look of sleeplessness, that it would feel like a violation of who they are at their core to simply get rid of it. They'll tell you every gory detail of their night and the long cleaning of the cast-off viscera, if you so desire, long before they even consider making themselves presentably rested-looking.
So if you're seeing posts on message-boards from fleshbros claiming to know everything about the art, think twice before you shell out the coin. Instead of buying into their classes, consider going out and asking the tiredest-looking passersby about the subject. Odds are fair you'll learn far more than you could imagine, both about fleshwork and yourself.
(The odds are also fair that you will be punched squarely in the jaw, though. Just trust your instincts on this one.)
