The answer is "yes" if you were one of the hundreds of people who lined Pitt Street Mall to be among the first customers at cosmetic giant Sephora's flagship store.

On Friday, Tamara Fuller, 37, had a 3pm flight back to her home city of Adelaide but at noon she was lined up with a group of friends in Sydney's CBD with a long shopping list and tired feet, after arriving in the queue at 7am.

"I've got to buy things for nine of my friends. I've come prepared with a list, colour charts and they have sent me photos so I know what to find," she said.

Topping the wish list was a variety of Make Up Forever products, numerous tubes of YSL's best-selling Touche Éclat concealer and a selection of Sephora's private label lip glosses and lipsticks.

The crowd heaved and screamed with all the delight of One Direction fans as staff members threw open the doors to the brand's 2000^th, two-storey, 650-square-metre store and performed an Apple Store-esque choreographed dance to Taylor Swift's catchy ditty Shake It Off.

The French cosmetics house, owned by luxury conglomerate LVMH, will stock 100 brands across skincare, makeup, haircare, body and fragrance, including more than 30 exclusive names, including Marc Jacobs Beauty, Givenchy, Kat Von D, Cover FX, Elizabeth and James, Formula X, IT Cosmetics, Tarte and Sephora's own label.

The beauty supermarket's arrival in Australia has been 10 years in the making.

"Australia has been highlighted by a number of international brands, and even within LVMH for many years, as being a really exciting and dynamic market," Sephora's business development director for the Asia region Libby Andersen told Fairfax Media.

"We offer a really different retail experience from anything else that is available in the Australian market. We really want to encourage freedom inside our stores," she said. "You should feel free to wander around a store and at any stage be able to touch and feel the products. There should be testers available for everything. So for every single product that you see, there should be a price readily displayed so people will always know what the products are about and how much they cost."

However, cost is an issue that is as sticky as a cheap lip gloss.

Sephora has no plans to undercut local retailers on existing brands such as L'Oreal, Lancome, Clinique, Estée Lauder and Clarins, which represent about one-third of its sales overseas.

Prices for most of these products are still 10 to 20 per cent higher than those in the United States, even after two years of "price harmonisation" by the big cosmetics and skincare brands in collaboration with Myer and David Jones.

"If a brand is already in the market we don't tell them to give us a cheaper price [and] we don't want to compete with department stores and other players based on lower pricing," LVMH's Asia and Middle East president Ravi Thakran said.

"But any brand we bring in, we'll bring that in with pricing equality [with the US]."

Beauty blogger Kimberly Nissen, of The Plastic Diaries, is pleased with Sephora's Australian arrival but encourages shoppers to do their research.

"They do stock some great brands, like Kat Von D, which you previously had to pay triple the price for, thanks to mail forwarding services from overseas retailers," she said.

Brands like Bite were exclusive to the new bricks-and-mortar superstore, although Australian-owned and operated online store Adore Beauty has sold the brand famous for its creamy and colourful lipsticks for a number of months, but the pricing was comparable, Nissan said.

A Bite lipstick from Sephora will cost $33, while the same product is available online for $36.95.