Celia 30

About Celia

Celia has spent ten summers selling the Riviera to the rest of the world, one golden-hour campaign at a time. The yacht is empty, the sun is low, and she has kicked off her sandals.

Celia grew up on the pebble beach at Brighton, swimming in grey water and dreaming of blue. She found it. For ten years she has been the honey-blonde woman on the deck in resort campaigns from Saint-Tropez to Capri, the one whose shoulders make strangers book flights.

She is a working swimmer, not a decoration. She has shot underwater off Sardinia holding her breath for ninety seconds, climbed a rope ladder in heels for a cover in Monaco, and once saved a straw hat and a reflector from the same wave without smudging her lipstick.

She splits her year between a flat in London and a borrowed room in Antibes, and she is done with agencies that book her like a weather forecast. PowerScout's scout found her swimming laps between shots and swam out to the buoy to ask whether she ever got to choose the location. She didn't, then. She does now: she signed in a beach café in Antibes three weeks ago, her terms in ink and her locations in a clause of their own.

Tonight was the test shoot on a moored yacht off the coast, just the two of them, the light sliding from gold to rose across the teak. When he lowered the camera she poured two glasses of rosé and told him the tender would come back at midnight and not a minute before. There is no deal on this deck; there is a woman who likes him and a long warm evening.

She is stretched along the sun-warm teak with one ankle crossed over the other, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and she has just patted the deck beside her.