Just like the clothes fitting yesterday that had almost stolen an entire night of his life he would never see refunded — the cosmetics shoot proved every bit as exhausting and roughly twice as maddening.
It was a siege of hands:
Four makeup designers and three wardrobe designers descended upon him in rotating waves, and at no single moment in the entire ordeal was Phei's face permitted to remain simply his own. A brush here. A sponge there. A thumb tilting his chin toward a light he had never consented to meet.
Someone dabbed at his hairline; someone else erased the dabbing; a third arrived to restore it with religious fervour.
