BODY: If any manga heroine was always destined to sell mascara, it's Nana Osaki β the chain-smoking punk vocalist whose smudged black lash line has been a cosplay benchmark for a quarter-century. Now Kao's drugstore makeup giant KATE is making it official: a NANA collaboration edition of its Lash Burst mascara goes on sale October 20.
The tie-up dresses the existing Lash Burst product in collaboration-exclusive packaging drawn from Ai Yazawa's series, and KATE is backing the launch with a tiered gift campaign rather than a single freebie. At the brand's KATE TOKYO store in Shibuya Sakura Stage and on KATE's official TikTok Shop, buying one collaboration item earns an original sticker; buying two upgrades you to an acrylic keychain. Both run only while stock lasts β a phrase Japanese collectors have learned to read as "go on day one."
Kao's own online store, My Kao Mall, runs a separate deal: spend Β₯4,000 or more including tax and the first 500 shoppers receive an acrylic keychain. That campaign runs until 11:59 p.m. on November 19, giving latecomers a window the in-store bonuses won't.
It lands in the middle of an unusually busy stretch for NANA merchandise. Yazawa's series has already fronted two waves of Godiva collaborations this year, and the artist recently drew a vinyl sleeve for Dreams Come True β all for a manga that has been on hiatus since 2009.
The insider take
The venue choice says as much as the product. KATE TOKYO's Shibuya Sakura Stage shop sits in one of the city's newest redevelopment towers, and pairing it with TikTok Shop β a channel that only opened to Japanese sellers last year β signals Kao chasing exactly the Gen Z buyer who discovered NANA through streaming rather than Cookie magazine. Among longtime readers, though, the mood is more complicated: the top fan comment on the original story wasn't about mascara at all, but a plea for Shueisha to finally collect the stranded late chapters into a tankΕbon. Twenty-six years in, NANA's fandom has learned to take its collaborations and keep waiting.
Originally reported by γ³γγγ―γγΏγͺγΌ - ζζ°γγ₯γΌγΉ (Japanese).