Indie-Pop Darling Seeks Eyeliner

Shopping For J-Beauty With Carly Rae Jepsen.

Carly Rae Jepsen is a candy-coated pinball bouncing off the walls at a ballistic pace in a Chinatown beauty store, making 1,000 observations a minute. The store is the size of a college dorm room, stocked mostly with colorful bottles imported from Japan and Korea: Every inch of space that is not occupied by a human body is teeming with product, including men’s “rubber” hair pastes, J-pop idol eyelashes, and a set of night girdles that promises to reduce cellulite. “I feel like we’re in Tokyo,” Jepsen says. Her eyes, manga-size, scan a row of sheet masks printed with animal faces. Will you be a dog, the packaging asks, or will you be a cat? Jepsen considers her options for half a millisecond before moving on to her next quest: “the goopy stuff.”

“Do you think they have the goopy stuff?” she asks. “Mama loves that.” (It is unclear what the goopy stuff is, or if we ever find it.)

As a singer-songwriter, Jepsen is huge in Japan. (Not dimensions-wise: At five feet two inches tall, she is the perfect size for Japan.) The country embraced her early on, thanks to the winning harmony of her viral brand of carbonated bubblegum pop music and the cultural appeal of her adorable presentation. It was two promnight bops—“Call Me Maybe” and “I Really Like You”—that brought Jepsen into the houses and ears of every person in America. The latter single appeared on her 2015 album, Emotion. This year, she followed it up with Dedicated, an exuberant 15-track manifesto on the art of the pop music form. Critics agree: It bangs.