Under the influence

I attended my first influencer event last week, and it was eye- opening.

There can be no denying I was not the target audience for the brand in question. It was a beauty product that is something to do with sheet masks. I assumed a sheet mask related to nocturnal incontinence, but apparently it is to do with making your skin smooth. My skin is not smooth. I have come to terms with that and expect it to remain unsmooth.

The event was magnificently put together. I arrived at a Dubai hotel to find that even the lifts had been branded, with stickers over the button I needed to press, and the brand’s Instagram tag on the mirror.

I resisted the incitement to take a selfie. But I might have been the only person at the event who didn’t succumb – and succumb constantly.

I came out of the lift into a room filled with pink light and smoke and dressed-up women photographing themselves, their friends, their cocktails, the brand’s signage and the hostesses in their space-themed Barbarella outfits and blonde wigs. Most were using their phones. Some had high- end cameras. Some had assistants to work their high- end cameras for them. “You need to be at the front when it starts,” I heard one cameraman say. When starts?

Dancers dressed as aliens ( I assume, though I’ve not met a real Martian) with green-painted skin, pink wigs and bright red lips posed motionless on a stage. They only moved – in synchrony – when a sinister voice- over every five minutes encouraged us to try the Skin-Scan Station. Booths on the room’s periphery offered to paint my nails so they would glow in the dark. Lots of people, models and guests, had glitter on their faces.

There were flamboyant drinks galore, and the canapes included smoked salmon, cream cheese with truffles, and white macarons stuffed with foie gras. A counter calling itself The Inventing Room served ice cream on dry ice. When the guests ate it, smoke came out of their mouths, and they took selfies of this. It was all so Instagrammable.

Some women were walking while talking into their phones, not chatting but doing to- camera pieces. They stopped after and checked their videos.

Then started. A space opera. With a soprano dressed like an ice queen, pursued by the pink- haired dancers, performing an aria that I couldn’t understand but ended with the name of the brand.

Phones, which had been clutched like cocktail glasses during small talk, were all raised. Before a man came on stage to discuss the merits of the product. When you use it, “Insecurities are replaced with pride and charisma, allowing a natural glow to take over,” he said. The product is “flabbergasting,” he promised.

The product is not meant for me, and the whole event was alien in both literal and figurative terms. I’m certainly flabbergasted. But impressed.