The actress Yumi Sugimoto is now 35 years old and first appeared in the Toei tokusatsu series Engine Sentai Go-onger, broadcast around 17 years old. From about that time, she established herself as a gravure idol too, despite not having the chops in terms of cup size.
She enjoyed a prolific gravure career throughout her twenties, perhaps peaking with her semi-nude photo book Chiamata in 2015.
This was followed two years later by her marriage to a younger man, which seemed to signal the end of her gravure output — but she got divorced in 2019.
Sugimoto appears in the February 17 issue of Weekly Playboy showing off athletic body. She has also released a digital photo book called Beautiful Witch featuring unused images from the shoot.
How does Sugimoto maintain her beauty as she approaches 40? Apparently it’s through doing yoga, stretching, and drinking koji amazake.
To be fully accurate, this isn’t her first gravure comeback. Back in 2022, when she was 32 years old, Sugimoto returned to gravure with a shoot for Flash, but this is her first appearance in Weekly Playboy in around 18 months (which is a long time in the desert if you’re a former 2010s idol now in her mid-thirties).
The Weekly Playboy issue marks the 50th anniversary of the Super Sentai metaseries with gravure shoots featuring various actresses associated with the franchise, including Rina Aizawa, Nashiko Momotsuki, Arisa Komiya, Maya Imamori, and Marupi.
Perhaps fueled by male millenials’ nostalgia for the women they hankered after in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we have seen various gravure comebacks recently, including Serina, Chinatsu Wakatsuki, Rei Toda, Rina Koike, and even Haruka Ayase.
