"I try to be taken seriously, and it's kind of hard."

STUDENT LIFE THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A SOAP'S SUCCESS "They wanted me to look a certain way, and so they put a bunch of make-up on my face. They did my hair. It couldn't have moved if we had been in a tornado," said Laura Saxe, recounting her first and only professional modeling job. But that look sold--sold soap that is. Saxe, a UC Davis graduate student in agro-ecology is best known as "Miss Laura, the Sonsy Soap Girl," familiar throughout Sichuan, China, since that modeling job six years ago put her face on soap boxes throughout the province. Saxe was participating in the second year of a Whitman College postgraduate exchange program in Sichuan, when a friend asked if she would be willing to model for a soap company that was looking for a foreigner to launch its new campaign. On a whim, she agreed, modeled for the company and received $1,125 for her work. Saxe left the country soon after the job and never thought about it until a friend from her hometown of Walla Walla, Wash., told her that her face was on billboards, buses and shopping bags all over Sichuan. "I don't know why they picked me, to be quite honest," she said. "Or picked a foreigner in general because there are a lot of beautiful women in Sichuan. That's not even an issue." What has become an issue in China, though, is the legal rights to Saxe's image. In August 1998, Sonsy soap discovered that another soap company, Bomei, had used Saxe's photo on its own product, a common practice in China, where copyright protection is lax. The resulting and precedent-setting lawsuit was such big news in Sichuan that more than 30 articles were written about it. Sonsy sued Bomei for $50,000 and won, but was awarded only $1,125--the fee it had paid Saxe. Saxe has since sued Bomei as well, asking for compensation for use of her image. News of the case has now spread far beyond Sichuan. Since May, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, People magazine, National Public Radio, Voice of America and other media have featured the story. Saxe has definitely been affected by the attention, which has periodically pulled her away from her thesis work in international agricultural development. She has also been the target of some good-natured joking from colleagues, and her introduction to the head of her research project was as the Sonsy soap girl. "He sees the article in the International Herald Tribune," Saxe says of the Parisian head of the project. "He says, 'Is this the same Laura Saxe we just put on the project?' I try to be taken seriously and it's kind of hard. But that's okay. It's been a little surrealistic. You just kind of wonder who's going to call next."