Back when I was programming in FoxPro, my friend - bless her pointy-little-head - used to berate me for my kludgy approach to problem solving. She was right, of course, and is now a Microsoft MVP to prove it, whilst I'm still a nurse... but this time, just this time, the kludge seemed to have worked. Kinda.

Yes, it's not an elegant solution, but it's sorta getting results:

What is becoming increasingly apparent is that in order for anyone to manually manipulate these nodes and attach stuff and modify / tweak / enhance (if such a thing is possible - they look pretty dang near perfect to me, but what do I know!) them, they bloody well better have a doctorate in physics. Or have played with nodes since their infancy.
But anyway, it worked. What I did was, create a new material zone called Template Lips, moved all the lippie stuff in there. Then in Template face, I created a similar set of nodes, but this time using a different mask. It was another kludge: made from desaturating an existing eye-shadow template, and flattening it onto a white background, then inverting it. Voila, my mask... such as it is.

Charlotte's seen better days.

I might just wait until VSS for Dummies comes out....

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks