On a stage carpeted in hot pink, two young women race to apply lipstick while balancing on wobble boards. With seconds left on the clock, they make their way to a camera in the wings and pose for photos that are displayed on a large screen to the gathering crowd. The game is So You Think You Can Glam, and precision under pressure is the criterion though which, with shouts and applause, one of the women will be crowned the champion.
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Staff members of Clinique cosmetics take photos and spray mist onto attendees passing by their brand booth
Around the rest of the country, the Australian public is deciding on their new government. But inside the old railway workshops in Sydney’s Eveleigh, the key issue for appraisal is makeup.
It’s been nearly 45 years since Susan Sontag wrote: “To preen, for a woman, can never just be a pleasure. It is also a duty.” At Meccaland, that duality explodes from a glitter cannon. A “beauty festival” and an extravagant branding exercise by Melbourne-based cosmetics retailer Mecca Brands, the event is part bolstered shopping experience and part consumer conference, with service staff and Instagram-ready backdrops at every eye-popping turn.
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YouTuber from Brisbane with 1.9m subscribers, Isabella Fiori, 21, meets and greets fans at one of Meccaland’s many brand booths.
This is only its second year in existence, but already Meccaland has more than doubled in size. 3,000 tickets were on offer to each of the weekend’s five sessions, with two of the sessions selling out, including the election day event.
The Saturday session opens with attendees being ushered by cheerleaders into a neon-lit tunnel to the tune of Taylor Swift’s latest song, ME!. Through a curtain of pink streamers they come, camera phones held aloft to capture the awaiting army of staff, who also have cameras out, each group filming the amusing existence of the other.
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Meccaland enthusiasts take a selfie at the entry of the three-day cosmetics event in Eveleigh, Sydney.
Mecca’s PR team say that the crowd on Friday night’s opening session rushed the stalls. Saturday’s attendees – mostly young women from tween-age to twenties – are less frenzied, though still enthusiastic. Selfies are snapped on a throne made of mirror glass, and on a slide fashioned to look like a big pink splash. A pink ferris wheel quickly attracts a queue. In an area of the festival named the Temple of You, teens climb a pyramid emblazoned with self-help mantras for the social-media age: “Dream to beam,” and, “Too glam to give a damn.”
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Attendees take selfies and immerse themselves in the Instagram-ready sets built for Meccaland.
At a stall operated by US skincare manufacturer Clinique, social media influencers Erin Scott and Karla Roccuzzo chat to fans. The pair share makeup tips via Instagram and YouTube, and have a combined following of more than 250,000 people. Roccuzzo, who lives in Melbourne, offers Guardian Australia a reason for the gathering of thousands to today’s event: “People just want to feel good, and makeup makes people feel good,” she says.
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Instagram stars Erin Scott, and Karla Roccuzzo meet and greet fans at the Clinique booth at Meccaland.
The success of Meccaland is in part reflective of its parent company’s increasing slice of Australia’s $4.2 billion cosmetics retail market. With over 100 stores across Australia and New Zealand, splitting demographics between the luxury Mecca Cosmetica banner and the more youthful Mecca Maxima stores, Mecca Brands – started in 1997 by entrepreneur Jo Horgan – has positioned itself at the intersection of experience-economy retailing and social media interactivity. That is, its social media feeds offer constant streams of products and promotions, while in its heavily staffed stores, product demonstrations and tutorials mimic those made by popular influencers online, creating a real-life reflection of online activity.
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Girls with ‘Superstar’ passes to Meccaland, granting access to meet and greets with beauty influencers, bloggers and vloggers behind the scenes, are seen posing on an insta-ready set.
Under a pair of enormous red lips hanging from the ceiling, attendees Arabella Cassidy, 22, and Nathan Capuano, 20, wearing matching glitter around their eyes, survey a stand of facial cleansers. The friends have travelled from Brisbane to be here. They estimate that their makeup and outfit preparations this morning took nearly three hours. “I wanted to come and see the crazy installations and all the new products they’re showing,” Cassidy says. “This is really the fun side of makeup.”
Stepping off the stage, where she has been discussing her work as a makeup artist for the likes of model Gigi Hadid and pop singer Rita Ora, Chantelle Baker says the makeup industry has changed considerably in recent years. “When I started out, there weren’t even courses to be a makeup artist. You did a beauty course [instead],” she says. “Now there are kids in school saying they want to be a makeup artist, or they want to be an influencer or a beauty blogger. It’s very different now.”
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From left to right: Zoë Foster Blake, Elle Ferguson, Eleanor Pendleton and Michelle Battersby talk during the ‘power panel’ on stage about being brand bosses.
The packed-in audience for entrepreneur Zoë Foster Blake, who talks on stage about running her cosmetics empire Go-To Skin Care, attests to the aspirations in the room. The market is busy and competitive, Baker says, but there is evidently still money to be made.
After all, whether they came for the community, knowledge, influencers or selfies, at the end of the day, everyone exits through the pop-up shop.