Johannes Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring around 1665. The Mauritshuis calls it not a portrait but a tronie: a head of a type or character, here a girl in exotic dress, with a cloth around her hair and that single drop of light at her ear. A tronie does not have to be anyone. The museum describes her as an imaginary figure. If you look for the name of a model, you are asking the painting for something it does not give.
What it does give is contact. The mouth is slightly open. The background is dark enough to push the face forward. The pearl is hardly a piece of jewellery; it is a spot that gives the cheek a counterweight. Look at the edge of the cloth on her head: that is where the fabric stops and the skin begins. That transition is sharper than the gaze. The gaze is merely a turn of the neck.
Stay with what is visible. The yellow jacket, the headscarf, the moist gleam in the eye. A tronie is an exercise in looking at someone you do not need to know.
