When the Makeup Comes From the Mine Next Door
Chihiro Ooka first invited people to Tōei to enter a sericite mine and make their own foundation. Then the pandemic interrupted the visits. The town’s mineral would need another way to reach them.
The result was moto, a makeup brand built around an ingredient most people encounter only in small print. Sericite, sometimes called silk mica, is a fine mineral powder used in foundation, face powder and eye shadow. In Tōei, a mountain town in northeastern Aichi Prefecture, it also connects an operating mine, a visitor program and Ooka’s work in rural revitalization.
moto makes that connection unusually literal. According to the brand, sericite accounts for at least 60 percent of its foundation and at least 80 percent of its face powder. The place of origin is central to the formula as well as the story.
An ingredient with an address
The name moto comes from 素, a Japanese word that can mean an unadorned state, an origin or a foundation. The brand describes its approach as making things with attention to their essence and origins, honestly toward people and the environment.
That is a broad ambition. The more specific question is how a cosmetics company can keep the source of a material visible after it has become something as familiar as makeup.
How Ooka came to Tōei
moto was founded by Chihiro Ooka.
Born in 1991 in Wakayama City, Ooka was not, by her own account, an especially strong student. She later entered Kyoto University of Art and Design — now Kyoto University of the Arts — where she studied three-dimensional modeling and sculpture. In her first year, she wanted to join an art project connected to society, but missed the interview. By chance, she joined a program in Shimane Prefecture to study the traditional performing art Iwami Kagura, a traditional performance combining music and dance.
For the next four years, she traveled frequently to Shimane and took part in kagura performances. She also saw, up close, how rural towns were slowly emptying out. Young people left. Shops closed. Festivals were still lively, but the number of people able to support them was shrinking.
Before graduating, she took night buses, rented bicycles and visited about 60 festivals across Japan, looking for a place where she might commit herself. In December of her senior year, she arrived in Tōei to see Hanamatsuri, the town’s kagura festival.
What kept her there was not only the festival. Local residents saw a young woman from elsewhere arriving alone with a large backpack. They invited her inside, gave her oden and let her rest at the kotatsu. That direct, unforced warmth became one reason she later moved to Tōei.
In 2013, at 22, Ooka moved to Tōei and joined Japan’s rural revitalization cooperation program.
Her first assignment was to help revitalize the area through edible wild mountain plants. She cleared land and planted with local residents, only to realize later that mountain vegetables can take about three years from planting to harvest. The cooperation program also lasts three years. In other words, she might complete her entire term before seeing results.
For a time, she was lost. She had just left university, had little work experience and did not yet know what she could offer the town.
The turn came through a concrete proposal. The president of Sanshin Mining Industrial Co., Ltd., the company that mines Tōei’s high-quality sericite, approached her with an idea: to turn this rare mineral resource into a way for more people to come to know the town.
For Ooka, the idea met a personal problem. She had sensitive skin and found that many commercial cosmetics caused irritation. Buying base makeup felt like taking a gamble. When she learned that Tōei’s natural mineral could be used to make foundation with a visible material source, she said yes.
A mine visit, followed by a makeup workshop
Before launching the makeup brand, Ooka developed naori, a program that takes visitors into the sericite mine and then guides them through making foundation.
naori goes further than a typical hands-on workshop. Participants enter the mountain mine, learn where cosmetic raw materials come from, and then use sericite mined in Tōei to make their own foundation.
The name naori comes from the mining term 直り. In a vein, it refers to a place of especially high grade, often formed where veins intersect or where the angle of a vein changes.
The program connects two things a cosmetics counter usually keeps apart: the finished powder and the place where its raw material is extracted.
The program developed into a registered Beauty Tourism initiative, drawing visitors to a town whose role in cosmetics was otherwise easy to overlook.
When visitors could no longer come
After 2020, the pandemic forced naori to suspend its programs or limit the number of participants. What had once depended on people coming in person — entering the mine, making foundation by hand, feeling the material for themselves — could no longer be brought to them in the same way.
Ooka and her team began developing a product that could reach people beyond the in-person program. That became the starting point for moto cosmetics.
In 2021, Ooka established 株式会社もと, Moto Inc., and began developing makeup products that would make Tōei sericite usable in everyday life. Development was not simple. In ordinary cosmetics, mineral powder is often only one part of a formula. moto wanted to raise the proportion of Tōei sericite substantially, so that the material itself would become the center of the base makeup.
According to moto’s product information, the foundation contains at least 60 percent sericite and the face powder at least 80 percent. Developing products with such high proportions meant working on both the formula and its feel in use.
After two and a half years of repeated trials, the team released moto Mineral Rich Foundation and moto Mineral Rich Powder.
What the mineral contributes
Sericite is a natural mineral used as a powder base in makeup. moto describes it as contributing a smooth feel and soft luster.
According to the brand’s materials, Tōei in Aichi Prefecture is the only place in Japan that produces cosmetic-grade sericite. The sericite mined and refined there by Sanshin Mining Industrial Co., Ltd. is stable in quality and is used not only in Japan but also in cosmetics around the world.
moto’s difference lies in not treating sericite as just another ingredient. It places the material’s origin, proportion and feel at the center of the product.
moto describes its foundation as offering gentle coverage with a silky luster and smooth feel. The face powder is described as fine-textured, with a naturally translucent finish. The result will vary with skin condition and application.
Tea seed oil from a neighboring town
In addition to sericite, moto uses tea seed oil, pressed from the fruit of tea plants.
moto lists tea seed oil as a moisturizing ingredient. The brand says its Shitara tea seed oil is cold-pressed from seeds collected by local residents in the neighboring town of Shitara.
Trying the products in Tōei
moto’s directly operated shop, もとの店, opened in Tōei on December 12, 2025. The shop is located at:
42-1 Hirai, Shimoda, Tōei, Kitashitara District, Aichi Prefecture, inside datte
Japanese address: 愛知県北設楽郡東栄町下田字平井42-1（datte内）
The shop is not only a place to buy moto products. It also carries local specialties from Tōei and works by ceramic artists who live in the town. Visitors can ask staff about the ingredients and formulas and try the products before choosing a shade.
Because the shop operates on an irregular schedule, visitors should check the official Instagram account, @MOTO_SELECT, before going.
Outside the directly operated shop, moto products are also available at selected retailers, including ＠cosme NAGOYA at Nagoya Station in Aichi Prefecture, 豊穣屋 in Toyokawa and A.U.S東京 in Tokyo.
The town stays part of the product
naori asked visitors to travel from a mine to a makeup workshop. moto carries the same connection in the other direction: out of Tōei, in a foundation compact or a jar of powder.
The material’s origin does not tell a customer everything about how the makeup will suit their skin. It does tell them something an ingredient list alone cannot: which town, mine and makers stand behind a powder they might use every morning.
Sources:
moto: product information and sericite proportions