Looking Beautiful on your Wedding Day starts the night before
Style Advice for Brides: Look and Feel your best on your Wedding Day
After all the pre-wedding organisational preparations no bride wants to leave looking beautiful to chance. Fortunately to look and feel your best on your wedding day is a result of preparation not luck. A happy hour (or two…) spent researching the web’s top tips on this subject produced some great blog posts relating to Wedding Day Preparation. I have listed three of them below, with my own comments added. Enjoy. And get planning…
1. Martha Stewart Weddings pre-Wedding Day Tips to Feel your Best
This is a simple straightforward list of easy to implement steps to take. For example, author, Claire Sullivan, cites getting a good night’s sleep amongst her list items. We all know that a good night’s sleep is one of nature’s best answers to looking and feeling on top form. However, sleep may elude you on your pre-wedding night, so I have added to this tip. Cultivating a calm state conducive to sleep is not a question of luck, it’s a question of preparation. A calm mind will lead to a calm night’s sleep. Learn to put your brain to bed.
The Night before your Wedding Day: Put your brain to bed
To expand on the subject of getting a good night’s sleep I would add “Put your brain to bed.” By this I mean shut your brain down for the night. Close off all opened tasks your brain is dealing with. Small questions buzzing round your head the night before your wedding could keep your brain awake. For example did you move Great Aunt Enid to sit with her best friend? Did your maid of honour change the time the car will pick you up? Close off all your open tasks the night before if you can, to ensure a good night’s sleep. Any questions which can’t be answered the night before need to be written down so that they are out of your head. Put your brain to bed and get a good night’s sleep yourself.
The Night before your Wedding Day: Pillow Spray
Additionally, I think a pillow spray is a great way of inducing lovely calm sleep. Trial them out beforehand to make sure you don’t react to one and find a scent that you love. If you can use it regularly before the night before then the scent itself can become a trigger for sleep (see this article by Psychology Today on the power of smell).
Pillow sprays which I love are This Works Deep sleep pillow spray and Ren’s Now to Sleep Pillow Spray.
2. Wedding Day Advice from The Knot
This is a really useful, practical list on how good preparation is the key to looking and feeling amazing on your wedding day. I love the recommendation to establish a sleep routine. Don’t be discouraged though if you find yourself really busy in the last month before the wedding and difficult to keep to your sleep routine. Simply have a strategy in place to deal with disruption. This applies not only to sleep but to all routines you may have in place.
Strategies to deal with disruption before your Wedding Day
It’s very easy to start a routine with the best intention only to become despondent when the routine becomes hard to maintain. Before your wedding you are bound to be busy, and probably juggling work, or maybe moving house or undertaking home renovations alongside your wedding preparations. With a busy life it can be challenging to establish a sleep routine. Course correcting is a key factor in dealing with disruption. Course correcting is the plan for when the plan goes wrong.
The Plan for when the Plan Goes Wrong before your Wedding Day
Course correcting is a simple technique designed to get you back on track. Your sleep routine of bed by 10.30pm may be derailed by a night out with your bridesmaids and drinks with work colleagues . (and leave you tired). A simple course correcting plan would be:
- Establish a small routine to relax yourself before bed that is achievable when you get home late. The idea is that you get the best night’s sleep possible in the hours that you have whilst re-establishing your routine. For example: have a bath with essential oils, burn a scented candle in your bedroom and create 30 minutes of relaxation time before bed.
- Another small course correcting routine would be: a bath; write a todo list for the morning; 15 minutes reading a book.
- Another example would be balance the morning. Even if you can’t get to bed early try and make sure that your morning routine is consistent, and preferably not rushed. Don’t try and pack too much in, be organised. If a thousand things to do crowd your mind, write them down and leave them for a time when you can address them.
3. Pre-wedding Preparations Tip from Beauty and Tips Magazine
Finally, Beauty and Tips Magazine have a useful list for pre-Wedding Day preparations. This list is less to do with the night before and more to do with general wedding preparation. I love the idea of perfecting your wedding smile, but how do you do that I wonder? The idea, though, of preparing for what the day will require of you (a lot of smiling!) is very sensible.
It probably is a good idea to run through in your mind how the day will develop and how you will feel at each stage. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed: all the attention is on you; you want to talk to everybody; everything seems to happen so quickly. Visualising the day in advance can help to remove anxiety as well as anticipate with happiness.
Remove pre-wedding nerves: Visualise your Wedding Day in advance
Calm any pre-wedding nerves and take some time to visualise the day in your mind; imagine yourself at each stage of the day, at the service, reception, first dance, leaving the wedding. Visualise the event before it happens to remove anxiety. Imagine the day running smoothly (with your perfected smile of course!) which can calm nerves and remove any anxiety you may be feeling. The Lilac Lounge have a great blog post on exactly this topic which you can read here.
While the lists above are not exhaustive, I hope you find them useful. Maybe there is something there that either you haven’t thought of before or you haven’t implemented before. I’d love to know what it is for you. For me it was visualising the day before it happens to remove anxiety. I think that works in so many situations I’ll definitely be implementing it. Please let me know what you found interesting and will be implementing in the comments box below.
Have a great day.
Sarah