Key Takeaways
Wedding skin prep and hair care require crafting a thoughtful timeline to achieve your beauty goals. Timing out treatments and trying new products is essential to maintaining skin and hair health.
If you want to look your best when you say “I do,” wedding skin prep and hair care is a necessary part of the entire engagement journey. There’s a widely adopted belief that on your wedding day, you are to show up as the most radiant and elegant version of yourself. These pressures explain why so many brides panic during the planning of their wedding skin prep; it’s also why early on in aesthetician school, we were taught that brides-to-be are our most reliable customers.
All this to say, the first and perhaps most crucial step in prepping skin pre-wedding is managing your expectations. It is, of course, completely valid to want to feel beautiful and confident on your wedding day, but your skin will always have texture and pores. Accepting that, first and foremost, will make creating an efficacious and realistic skincare plan a whole lot easier.
So as opposed to binge-purchasing every product in sight, take some time to evaluate what exactly you want out of your skincare. Setting specific goals for yourself—whether that’s reducing acne, increasing collagen or elastin, or simply hydrating the skin—will ultimately allow you to create a routine that makes sense for you and puts you on track toward an attainable skin-care plan for your wedding day.
Keeping track of the timeline leading up to your wedding is also a crucial aspect of creating a pre-wedding skin-care plan. You want the benefits of all your products and treatments, while making sure none of the possible negative side effects pop up on the big day. To help get on track and better understand how certain treatments work, we spoke to experts, some of whom have worked with celebrities in preparation for their wedding day, about what products and treatments they recommend, as well as the best times to start and stop using certain skin-care products.
Why Start Wedding Skin Prep Now
“Skin just takes time to change,” shares Elizabeth Grace Hand, an esthetician and founder of NYC-based Ställe Studios. “Whether it’s building collagen, fading pigmentation, improving acne or strengthening the skin barrier, none of that happens overnight. I always tell brides that the best wedding skin isn’t created the month before the wedding. It’s built over the course of the year. The same way you prep with diet and exercise, skin takes patience.”
“I also think we’ve somehow been taught that taking care of your skin is superficial, but we don’t think that way about any other part of medicine,” adds Hand. “We go to the dentist to maintain our teeth. We exercise to preserve our muscles and bones. We get checkups because preventative care matters. Every doctor is ultimately trying to keep us healthier for longer. Your skin is your body’s largest organ, but for some reason people think taking care of it is just cosmetic. I don’t see it that way at all. To me, it’s about preserving the health and function of your skin, just like we try to preserve every other part of our body.”
Hand emphasizes that the goal isn’t to look like an entirely new persona as you head down the aisle. “It’s to look like yourself on your very best skin day,” she says. “And honestly, one of my favorite things is that so many of my brides keep coming in every month after the wedding. They realize how much better their skin feels when they stay consistent. Usually the moment their spouse comments on how good their skin looks without even knowing they had a facial… that’s when you know it’s working.”
Six to 12 Months in Advance
First Time Trying Injectables
According to Dr. Ranella Hirsch, a board-certified dermatologist based in Boston, if you’re hoping to try out injectables like Botox or a filler ahead of your wedding, the best thing to do is grant yourself as much time as possible. “In an ideal world, I would have people come in as early as a year before their wedding to create a plan—that way, we can discuss what you’d like to achieve and work together to ensure that you will have the best results on the day,” says Hirsch. She explains that giving yourself more time will also allow for more careful allocation of funds and open up the possibilities to more types of treatments. “Ultimately, more time equals way more options for you, not only just in terms of procedures, but, importantly, in terms of downtime and cost,” she adds.