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couple of years ago I started musing about the burgeoning business of beauty. Supermarkets mandating attendants to wear makeup, housewives sporting fake eyelashes to run on the treadmill, office bees taking makeup artistry classes, millennials seeking the latest dermatology procedures and all.

In the old days you got dolled-up for photo-ops on special occasions, nowadays thanks partly to social media every mundane happenstance is potentially a documented occasion.

The wave has since picked up momentum. Fashion bloggers are losing the spotlight to beauty vloggers with video tutorials on subjects from reducing sun spots to painting vampire eyes. Instagram and WhatsApp groups are flooded by possibly unlicensed sellers peddling popular brands not officially sold in Indonesia. In fact, a dispute has broken out on Twitter between such a seller and her overseas customer over unpaid merchandise.

Suffering from sluggish sales in recent years, retailers are tapping into the still-growing category. Department stores have long cooperated with credit-card issuers for limited beauty promotions, but now the playground has considerably expanded.

A group of distributors banded together to regularly throw a beauty bazaar at Balai Kartini, drawing much larger audiences than the long-running jewelry exhibition using the same venue.

Not to be outdone, Plaza Indonesia held a beauty festival throughout April. There were talk shows by dermatologists, makeup classes by celebrity makeup artists, beauty sketch exhibitions and even a nail art seminar. The days I popped in, women of all ages intently listened to the experts and left with a shopping bag or two.

One of those days I checked out Plaza Indonesia also happened to be during the weekend Female Daily Network (FDN) rolled out its second beauty festival at Senayan City. Initiated about a decade ago as a fashion blog called Fashionese Daily, the network groomed its community early on. Growing healthily in recent years, winning awards and grants alike, it is now a digital platform run by three high-achieving businesswomen focusing on beauty trends and boasting thousands of registered community members.

JakartaxBeauty 2017 featured 40 hip skincare and cosmetic brands, local and imported. It was heartening to see local brands like Purbasari and Makeover get mobbed. Rollover Reaction, a local brand with an almost cult following, sold out of some lipsticks halfway through the festival, I saw women begging to buy the testers. Despite charging for admission, the two-day inaugural event drew nearly 10,000 visitors, a promising number considering last year, a four-day diving exhibition at a larger site recorded 27,000 people in its 11th year.

This year, the festival ran for three days with 20 more participating brands. Drawing up to 19,000 visitors, many of whom bought three-day passes, it was pandemonium down to the final hours. Maybelline ran out of foundation every day just as Gondowangi Sariaji did of hair serum.

FDN doesn’t have sales numbers, but several returning participants I talked to projected a year-on-year doubling. Lakmé, the India-originated brand managed by Unilever, blanketed Jakarta with a presence at Senayan City’s main atrium in addition to both festivals seemingly raking up healthy sales at each point.

Beauty is the business du jour, but how long will the bounty last? There’s something that invokes loyalty more in this category than in others; genetics. Pear-shaped women may easily shun super-skinny jeans for equally chic pants, but oily skinned women won’t stray from oil-free products since dermatologists cost more. As long as women’s incomes increase, so will the skincare business.

What about full-on cosmetics and fake eyelashes? It reminds me of a decade ago when chic wigs were all the rage, worn from beauty parlors to corporate boardrooms. I suspect they command just a tad bit more loyalty, but will surely book bigger bucks until the next trend emerges. For the short run, though, FDN, with 700,000 registered community members nationwide behind it, is confident enough to signal the third beauty festival next year.

While you crunch the numbers cited above, let me rummage through my loot from the beauty events. I think one of those brushes is supposed to make my cheekbones sharper, if only I could figure out how to wing it. Wish me luck, daahlink, for the love of beauty.

— Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.