Well, I may have found a semi-solution, both to the "helmet" look & to SimPE as a texture replacer.
It turns out that the bf hair files I "pasted" in with Body Shop/PaintShop Pro X are pretty obvious to see, despite SimPE's "numbers only" policy! (A swatch of Blonde hair on an S1 background is pretty easy to spy when browsing through a Mannequin Skintone file!)
So deciding to take a chance, I exported the file with SimPE & fired up PaintShop Pro.
The "flood fill" on the scalp worked better than I thought (left the hair pretty much in tack) so I saved it & imported it back into the Mannequin file.
The results were pretty nifty...well, by
my standards anyway!
Here is little Surprise's new non-helmet Blonde hair from the front...
...and from the back:
Okay, it's not perfect...but quite frankly I'm pretty happy! (It beats the "helmet hair" look!)
My next "quest" is to see if I can learn the key to unraveling SimPE's texture numbers, so I don't have to use Body Shop at all.
-ZW