Brides,
I know how this season of your life can feel—exciting, magical, but also heavy with expectation. As a makeup artist, I see it all the time. The unspoken pressure. The quiet self-doubt. The overwhelming desire to be the most beautiful version of yourself—but not always knowing what that even means.
I recently saw a TikTok from a bride-to-be who admitted that wedding planning wasn’t what she thought it would be. Instead of joy, she felt consumed—by the pressure to create the perfect day, to meet expectations, to become this effortless, flawless version of herself. She spoke about feeling like she needed to transform—not just her wants for her wedding, but her body, her face, and so much more.
And it made me wonder—where did we learn this?
Is it the fairytales we grew up with, the ones that whispered that we needed to become Cinderella to earn a happily ever after? Or is it the modern fairytales—the Vogue-worthy, airbrushed images of perfection that used to be contained within magazine pages but now follow us everywhere, filling our feeds, our thoughts, our pockets?
Whatever the source, I want you to hear this: you do not need to become someone else to be worthy of this moment.
What the fairytales never told us is that a wedding isn’t the end of the story—it’s not the moment where everything becomes perfect. It’s not the prize for becoming "enough."
A wedding is simply a chapter. A moment where you stand before the people who love you most, alongside the person who has chosen you—not for your dress, or your makeup, or some impossible version of perfection, but for the way your presence fills the room, for the way your laughter feels like home, for the way your soul speaks to theirs.
We’re often told that we have to love ourselves before anyone else can love us. But after working with hundreds of brides, I don’t think that’s true. I think love—the act of being loved, of loving in return—is one of the ways we learn to see our own worth. Love is a mirror, reflecting back to us the beauty we sometimes struggle to see in ourselves.
So if the pressure of being a bride is making you shrink, if you find yourself measuring, comparing, questioning whether you are “enough,” let me remind you:
You are already perfect. Perfectly, beautifully you.
When you look in the mirror, you might search for perfection in the way your hair falls, in the symmetry of your face, in the softness or sharpness of your features. But that’s not where your beauty lives.
Your beauty is in the light in your eyes when you talk about something you love.It’s in the way your body moves when you laugh freely.It’s in the warmth in your voice when you comfort someone you care about.It’s in every part of you that cannot be captured in a photograph but is felt deeply by the people who love you.
And that’s the you your partner fell in love with. That’s the you your guests are coming to celebrate.
As your makeup artist, I’m not here to transform you into a bride. I’m here to bring out the bridal version of you.
Not a fairytale character. Not a magazine cover. You.
And that will always, always be enough.
Olivia xx
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