How to read 艶肌 in 艶肌メイク


**Question:** How is the 艶肌 in 艶肌メイク ("glossy skin make-up") pronounced?

**Context:** An Instagram influencer used 艶肌メイク in one of their posts.

**Background:** I struggle with newly coined Japanese terms on social media -
whether or not they are accepted by the larger Japanese population - because I
haven't heard them pronounced and they are not typically accompanied by
furigana. The 艶肌 in 艶肌メイク is one such case.

**My two attempts at an answer:** 艶肌 is read as either 「えんき」 (音読み) or
「あではだ・つやはだ」 (訓読み).

**How I landed at my answer:** A 漢語 word often (but not always) dictates an
音読み pronunciation, does it not? If so, then Japanese words that are not native
大和言葉 might possibly follow such a rule. In the case of my question, the
presence of メイク, a non-native word, might force the reading of 艶肌 to be 音読み
rather than 訓読み. The other possibility is that Japanese youth (like the
Instagram influencer mentioned above) might use 訓読み more often for words that
they themselves coin, hence my second possible answer.

**Thoughts:** I once asked a native if there was a way to guess the reading of
an unfamiliar word. She replied something to the effect of 「やっぱり慣れしかない」. I
suspect this is the case with my question.

**Final note:** This is my first post. I'll apply any criticism related to
question formatting/phrasing or doing ample research beforehand to my future
questions. よろしくお願いいたします。




A quick google search reveals that ツヤ肌 is another common spelling for the word
that you're looking for. Furthermore, on youtube you can find videos of
youtubers enunciating the word as ツヤハダ (see for example:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12BUWKAlYSk>).

As for the broader question of guessing the reading of a neologism, I guess
there are not set rules.

A lot of neologisms in Japanese are formed by contracting two preexisting
words (ex: 学割 <- 学生割引). In that case one can look at the readings of the
original words to recover the reading.

But when this not the case, a good rule of thumb could be to simply look at
the most common readings of the kanjis. I'm not a native speaker but it seems
to me that 艶 occurs more frequently as an isolated character, and hence is
more frequently read as ツヤ. In jisho.org, in almost all the compound words I
could find containing 肌, the kunyomi ハダ is used, making ツヤハダ the most probable
reading.

