After playing a mission or two of the campaign I closed the game to change some settings (eg. FoV) and reopened it and then decided to listen to the different voice packs in the char. creator however there wasn’t an option to close the character creator when I was done (short of just killing the game) so I made a random character with the intention of just deleting them. Once in the main menu I went to the character selection screen, selected the new char (yes, I’m sure it was that one), deleted it and it went away to die quiety and only my original character remained.
I then proceeded to spend one of my ability points (I can’t remember if I had to re-select my only remaining character before going into the abilities menu) and when I exited back to the main menu my original character had taken the appearance of the new one (but retained its rank and abilities) and seeing as the face/voice that the new char ended up with are unchangeable I can’t just recustomise the character - restarting the game did not reset the appearance and quickly entering a match showed the new character in the cutscene and what I could see of their body when in 1st person also confirmed this.
Seeing as I’d only done two matches ever I can just remake the original character and delete my new old one with no real loss, but this won’t always be the case.