“The younger girls here are more experimental about beauty,” Hanako Maeda says over the phone, having just arrived in Tokyo ahead of her Fashion Week show. It is a homecoming of sorts for the ADEAM designer, who will be showing in the city for the first time since her 2012 debut—a dreamy collection inspired by 19th-century Japanese fishermen’s garb, all boro-patched silks and jacquards, embroidered with sashiko stitching.
We’re comparing the American and Japanese approaches to makeup, a topic that Maeda, who splits her time between Chelsea and Ginza, is uniquely qualified to discuss. In New York, she says, women tend to choose products that enhance their natural beauty, flattering their skin tone or eye color and so forth. Not so in Tokyo. “A lot of Japanese girls are into the idea of taking on a different persona,” she says, citing pop icon Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and DJ Mademoiselle Yulia as two offbeat beauty muses. “They want to express their creativity and their personality through makeup.”
And so when it comes to the cult Japanese beauty brands to stock up on in Tokyo, color becomes the thing—a wide rainbow of shades, with the subtlest changes in tone. “If you’re looking for a peach blush, even at the pharmacies, they’ll have 20 different variations of peach!” Maeda says. Speaking of drugstores, how do Tokyo’s versions hold up? “My favorite is the Matsumoto Kiyoshi chain—sort of the Duane Reade of Japan, except the quality is amazing compared to what you’d find at a Duane Reade or CVS, and everything is less than half the price of what you see at the department store,” Maeda says. Think Shiseido lash curlers at $6 a pop. Need we say more?
Below, Maeda shares nine beauty products to pick up the next time you’re in Tokyo, from a boutique nail oil to a conditioning mascara.
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