Hanasui 'Next Level' Lip Range

Lip products are deceptively hard to shoot. From a distance they all look the same: a tube, a swipe of color, a smile. The difference lives in the details, in how the light catches a gloss versus a cream versus a tint that's meant to look like it's barely there. That was the real brief on this project for Hanasui's Next Level lip lineup: not to make three products look good, but to make them look distinctly like themselves.

The lineup centered on a Blurry Tint and a Liplast Cream, each given their own dedicated setup with a single talent, shot both applying and holding the product and then bare, letting the finish speak without a bottle in frame to explain it. A cream needs the light to sit and pool. A tint needs it to skim and diffuse. Get that wrong and the whole point of the product disappears into a generic close-up of lips. My approach was to build a consistent core lighting rig and let it flex per series, keeping the technique steady while adjusting for how each formula behaved under light.

The All Lip Series pulled everything together, folding Liplast, Butterbalm, and Blurry Tint into a single group composition, shot in both portrait and landscape, with and without product in hand. It's a different muscle than the solo setups. Where the individual shots isolate texture, the group frame has to hold multiple mouths, multiple undertones, and multiple finishes in the same breath without any one product drowning out the rest.

We leaned hard into wide lenses throughout, pushing right into the models' faces until the lips became the entire frame. It's an intimate, almost confrontational angle, the kind that doesn't leave room for the shot to be lazy. Every texture shows. Every highlight matters. High or low angles were chosen model by model, built around whichever facial feature carried the most attitude, because at that distance, attitude is doing half the work color usually does.

Casting mattered just as much as lighting here. The Next Level line wanted a range of lips, skin tones, and expressions across the visual direction, not one narrow beauty ideal repeated on loop. Some frames are playful, mouth open mid-laugh with product still glistening. Others are quiet and controlled, a single finger grazing the lower lip. That contrast kept the whole set from flattening into one mood, which matters when the client is trying to sell versatility as much as color.

What I liked most about this brief was how unglamorous the real work was. Nobody notices good lighting differentiation. They just feel that one shot looks glossy and juicy, another looks soft and blurred, a third looks rich and matte, without knowing why. That invisibility is the job. Hanasui's Next Level range asked for precision dressed up as ease, and that's the kind of problem worth building a whole shoot around.

Prayogo Yoedo

Photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.