The wedding beauty to-do list I created shortly after my engagement was extensive: Botox, filler, laser facials, spray tan, a possible mole-removal surgery, Morpheus8, HydraFacials, and anything with platelet-rich plasma. I vowed to finally be consistent about daily use of gua sha, Nutrafol, and tretinoin. I committed to frequent chemical peels, a smattering of face masks, and expensive new serums.
My goal was straightforward: to look the best I have ever—and will ever—look at my wedding. I poured over “bridal prep” lists with 18-month lead times and watched before and after TikToks where beautiful women smiled at me with glistening white teeth (add teeth whitening to the list) and shared their 8 to 13 “must-dos” before the Big Day. I watched in awe alongside the millions of others on #bridetok. Slowly, knots began to form in my stomach. Despite my wedding being 598 days away, it felt like time was running out for me to hone my routine, to ascend to an aesthetic nirvana.
Predictably, this “do everything all at once” approach did not hold. I was unable to employ seven new habits overnight. I did not have unlimited money for a medley of luxurious medspa treatments. Nothing was going as planned and as I got closer to my wedding, the knots in my stomach continued to tighten. I tried Botox for the first time, I dabbled in different lasers, I went through tubes of tretinoin and, despite checking things off of my bridal beauty to-do list, I continued to get more anxious. Until one day, I gave up on everything. I took a long hard look at my face, as is, acne scars and uneven eyebrows and moles, and decided: this will have to do.
As soon as I gave up, my stomach unclenched for the first time in months and almost by chance, because of my job as a beauty writer, I ended up in the office of esthetician Shani Darden for a facial. As I rattled off my ambitious beauty to-do list and all the ways I was falling short, she stopped me. To my total surprise, she told me that my approach was flawed from the beginning. When it comes to wedding prep, less can sometimes be more.