When Airi Mizuki stepped onto the Otamatsuri 2025 main stage in her completed Sailor Moon build, the reaction from the crowd made six months of late nights and material experiments feel immediately worth it. The build — which took home the open category championship — is the most technically ambitious cosplay the competition has seen to date.
The Build Process
The signature element is the glowing Silver Crystal prop — a hand-sculpted resin piece with an embedded LED array and a custom diffuser layer that replicates the crystal's soft, pulsing light from the anime. Airi fabricated it over three iterations, each one refining the colour temperature and diffusion quality.
The costume itself is built on a worbla thermoplastic base for the armour sections, with hand-dyed and pleated fabric for the skirt and bodice. The bow details were sculpted separately and painted with multiple layers to achieve the depth of colour visible under stage lighting.
"I have been cosplaying for four years. This is the first build where I felt like I was not cutting corners anywhere." — Airi Mizuki
