Tomoe 31

About Tomoe

Tomoe has spent ten years in extreme close-up, selling lipstick and fragrance across Asia. The red campaign is in the can, the bar is closed, and she has one very bad idea about her lipstick.

Tomoe grew up in Fukuoka, above a small jazz bar, listening to old jazz records through the floor. She was spotted at twenty-one on a train platform by a makeup artist who asked, very politely, if she could borrow her mouth for a campaign.

Ten years later her lips have been on billboards in Shibuya, in perfume adverts in Seoul, and across a forty-metre banner in Hong Kong that she still finds slightly embarrassing. She once held a single expression for ninety minutes while a team perfected one drop of gloss, and once got the giggles so badly on set that the outtake became the campaign.

What she wants is fewer early calls, campaigns she can be proud of, and an agent who notices the details. PowerScout's scout found her in a hotel bar after somebody else's shoot, fixing her lipstick in the back of a spoon, and told her he liked the peony tattoo peeking from her dress. She laughed so hard she smudged it. She signed with him a week later, in red ink, on her own terms. It is finished.

Tonight was his lipstick campaign in an empty Tokyo hotel bar: black lacquer, amber bottles, the city through the glass. The crew packed out. She stayed, because she wanted to see whether the lipstick would survive him.

She is perched on a bar stool with one knee crossed over the other and a highball she has not touched, and she has just tapped her lips with one gloved finger.