🎀 @airimai
Airi Mai
“Tokyo teeth, Hong Kong hours.”
Tokyo → Hong Kong Makeup, mostly Dressed up for absolutely no reason
201
Followers
12
Posts
10
Series
4
Cast
Who they are
Airi Mai, 26, born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and a Japanese-Chinese father, in Hong Kong since 21 — first for university, then because she never left. She works in beauty: a makeup artist who does editorial and campaign work and whose own face is the portfolio.
That is the engine of the account. She is dressed and painted every single day, for no occasion, because it is the job and because she likes it. A Tuesday afternoon at a coffee place gets the full face. The look changes constantly — the eye is different every week, the lip is different every week — and that variation IS the content.
Her world is the city at night more than the city at day: neon streets, small bars, taxis, the escalator, a friend's rooftop, the studio at 2am after a shoot. She is out constantly and it is never a party account — it is dinner, work, a fitting, a birthday.
The work
The formats
After Midnight
The end of the night. A lift, a stairwell, the back of a taxi, a hotel corridor, a car park under strip lights. Flash on, makeup still perfect, entirely alone and completely unbothered about what anybody thinks she was doing.
daily · post
Back Late
The city at 11pm from the back of a taxi or the top of the escalator. The one that looks like a film and is really just a commute.
biweekly · post
Dressed For Nothing
A full outfit and a full face, for a Tuesday coffee. The joke is the gap between the effort and the occasion, and it is never acknowledged.
weekly · carousel
Flash On
Direct flash, dark background, whatever she is wearing tonight. The cheapest and most characteristic frame in the account.
daily · post
His Jacket
Somebody else's oversized jacket over her own outfit, in his car, at his table, in a lobby that is not hers. Never a man in frame, never a name, never an explanation. The implication does all of the work.
weekly · post
Off The Boat
Water days. The junk off Sai Kung, the rooftop pool, Repulse Bay, a long weekend somewhere hotter. One bikini, many frames, the makeup never comes off — which is the joke and the signature at once.
weekly · carousel
The Fitting
Trying things on, photographed by somebody else. A studio mirror, a rail of clothes, a changing room curtain, a stool. The most openly styled series and the one that reads most like a shoot without being one.
weekly · carousel
The Look
Today's face. One close frame of the makeup — the liner, the lid, the lip — shot in flash or window light. The signature format and the reason the account exists.
daily · post
The Night Out
One night, told as a story reel: getting ready, the lift, the taxi, the door, the booth, the DJ, the floor, the terrace, noodles at two, the taxi home. Full glam throughout, and the makeup is still on in the last frame. The sequence is the point — a club night is not a photograph, it is an evening.
weekly · story
The Table
What she ate. Hot pot, dim sum, a neighbourhood place in Wan Chai. Often no person in the frame at all.
daily · post
The company
Mabel
The one from school
Twenty-six, known her since Year 7, a dentist, funnier than Airi and completely uninterested in being photographed. Appears constantly, always mid-sentence, never posing.
Jas
The hiking one
Thirty, half-Filipina, does trail ultras and drags everyone up hills at 6am. The reason the account has any landscape in it.
Ollie
The flatmate's dog
A small scruffy rescue terrier belonging to the flat downstairs, borrowed constantly, beloved by the audience, and the only male in the account.
The Sai Kung group
The boat
Eight or nine people who share a junk every other Saturday all summer. Never named individually, always in the frame.
Airi Mai is not a real person.
A written specification and a pinned reference photograph, rendered a few hundred times. Nothing here was photographed, nowhere here was visited, and nobody here has an opinion. Every line is a joke that someone wrote.