Every girl wants to look her best on her wedding day, especially when it comes to her skin. No one wants their wedding day photos to be ruined by acne, wrinkles, or just generally dull looking skin. Makeup can cover up some small issues, but if you want your skin to look your absolute best — your face, neck, shoulders and arms — it’s better to start with a great looking foundation.
Unfortunately, it is common for people to start getting their skin prepared for their wedding day only a week or a month in advance. The truth is, you should start your preparation around 6 months in advance to give your skin time to adapt to any new routines, products and treatments that you might start using.
6 Months Before the Wedding Day
Around half a year before your wedding day is the time to make an appointment with a skin care specialist, such as a dermatologist. If you have any skin problems, such as acne scars, melasma, rosacea, hyperpigmentation, wrinkles, or chronic acne, they can recommend treatments and products to help you minimize their appearance and control any future breakouts.
They can also give you more general tips on changes to your diet and regular skincare routine that will help your skin look as good as possible for your wedding day. Any treatment, product, or routine that they recommend may take several months for you to see complete results, which is why it is a good idea to start around 6 months in advance. If there are any issues with treatments not working, or if you have bad reactions to anything, you have time to adjust so there are no lingering problems by the time your wedding day comes around.
5 Months Before
This is the time you should conduct and finish any experimentation with the recommendations you were given by your dermatologist. Try different skincare routines, different products and brands, different techniques, different treatments, different medications, different diets, and so on. You should ideally have tried all of these at least once, so if anything didn’t work, or your skin reacted to badly, you can switch to something else.
By the end of the month, you should have your basic routine down pat, as well as your schedule for any remaining treatments and procedures you want to get done ahead of the wedding. You’ll know what works for you and makes your skin look its absolute best. It may take a month or two to learn everything that works best, which is why we recommend you take two months to do it while leaving another four months of time after.
4 Months Before
If you have some excess body fat on your stomach, thighs, neck, chin, or arms that you want to get rid of so your skin looks slimmer and smoother, or to help fit your dress better, there are a number of things that can help. The first and most affordable is a strict diet and exercise routine to help shed any excess fat and slim down.
However, there are also a few safe, painless and non-invasive treatments that can help. CoolSculpting, radio frequency, or laser treatments are the three most common that helps improve your body contouring by killing the fat cells under the surface of your skin. The effects of these treatments tend to take up to four months to be complete, as it takes that long for the dead fat cells to be removed by your body’s natural cell removal process.
3 Months Before
If you have not done it already, you should have a consultation with your makeup artist at least two to three months before your wedding day. They should tell you everything that they’ll do on your wedding day, including what types and brands of makeup they’ll use. It is important to try the makeup on yourself ahead of time for two reasons.
First, because you have time to try out some of the things they’ll do to tell if they look good on you — your skin will already have been changing from some of the routines and treatments you’re receiving, so you want to make sure their recommendations still work for you. Second, you’ll want to make sure you don’t have any negative reactions to the makeup they’ll be using, such as a rash or allergies.
2 Months Before
You shouldn’t have to make any more significant changes to your skincare routine, and you’ll start noticing all the benefits of it plus any other lifestyle changes and treatments you’ve made. If you are getting more aggressive skincare treatments, this should be the final period that you do them. You don’t want any lingering effects or complications from any procedure too close to your wedding day.
1 Month Before
This period is when you get your final basic treatments, such as a facial, chemical peel, or microdermabrasion. All of these are designed to simply rejuvenate the surface layer of your skin. Chemical peels use naturally occurring acids to remove your old layer of skin, and then a number of nourishing ingredients to fortify your fresh layer of new skin cells. Microdermabrasion does the same thing with microscopic needles to boost your collagen production to make all new skin cells.
These treatments can take around a week at most to fully recover from, as your skin will be red, puffy and sensitive to things like sunlight or heat. We recommend getting these treatments between two to one week ahead of time — if you’ve gotten the treatments before like we advised above, you should have a good idea of how long your recovery time is.
After this, it should be smooth sailing. If you have chronic conditions such as acne, melasma or rosacea, it’s a good idea to get a strong emergency measure arranged with your dermatologist. It can be a strong prescription to deal with an acne breakout or a pre-arranged appointment within the final week so they can perform any emergency procedures.
About the Author:
A Fellow of the American Society of Laser Medicine and Surgery, and a diplomate of the American Board of Laser Surgery in Cosmetic Procedures, Dr. Craig Crippen, M.D. has trained with physicians who are at the forefront of laser & aesthetic medicine. Working extensively in public and private medicine since 2003, Dr Crippen has devoted his practice exclusively to medical & cosmetic skin care procedures/treatments in response to rising demand.
This is a guest post courtesy of Dr. Craig Crippen of DermMedica, a skin care clinic located in beautiful Kelowna, BC.
