A few tips on make-up and pre-wedding skincare, that can be applied all year round!
Whether you’re jetting off to a hot country, or having a glass of wine in the in the garden, please remember to ALWAYS put sunscreen on your face AND DECOLLETE! The skin on your chest is the same as the skin on your face, so it should be treated the same. It often gets forgotten about for most of the year, whereas the face is usually taken care of with your day cream or foundation’s SPF. This causes major sun damage, and over the years the décolleté can prematurely age, making it look very different to the skin on the face – blotchy, pink and wrinkled. So cream up ladies and gents! Face, chest and arms are all areas that are likely to be on show on if you have an event coming up, and lobster red is hard to cover. If you do happen to toast yourself, here are my top tips for treating and disguising your sunburn:
Care & repair
We all know about using aloe vera as an after-sun treatment, because it’s great for cooling the skin, but 10 times better is lavender oil. It treats all kinds of burns, and mixed well with a good quality facial serum or body cream, it can dramatically tone down the redness of sunburn overnight. Try using a serum that is formulated for repairing sun damage – look for ingredients like rosehip oil, sea buckthorn and pomegranate seed extract. Lovegrove Essentials Healing Touch Serum (lovegroveessentials.com) contains all of these, and with a few drops of lavender added will make a perfect overnight treatment for the face and chest.
Sunscreen
Many day creams and BB creams now contain an SPF, but they’re not always particularly high or broad spectrum, meaning in strong sun, you may still get burnt. Look for a tinted cream that has SPF 30 or above, or apply a light facial SPF before applying your make up. Be sure to let it soak in properly before applying anything on top, and don’t forget your décolleté!!
Cooling primers/sprays
There’s nothing worse than trying to apply make-up to someone who is hot and sweaty! Whatever your primer of choice, pop it in the fridge overnight. It will glide on just the same, and will cool your hot skin down before make-up application. For a refreshing boost throughout the day, try a cooling spray. Urban Decay Chill Cooling and Hydrating Makeup Setting Spray (www.urbandecay.com) can be applied over make-up, and used during the day to cool and refresh your skin.
Heat-resistant make-up
For the big day, look to use something that will resist high temperatures. Full-coverage foundations can often feel heavy in hot weather, so focus on getting your skin looking great, 3 weeks to a month before the big event, so that you can go for a lighter coverage, particularly if you’re getting married somewhere hot. Sunburn can often peel and look shiny, but too much powder can make it look even dryer. Go for a dewy, hydrated finish and embrace the shine! You can always dab a little powder on for the photos.
Bronzing and colour correction
If all else fails and your skin is still looking red, you need to balance it out by neutralising the high colour with something yellow or green toned. Lots of companies do a green tinted primer, so try one of these and hope for the best. Redness can also be toned down by bronzing, and wasn’t that what you were going for when you went out in the sun in the first place?! Try a couple of coats of a self-tan moisturiser on your face and body. The yellow pigments in this should help to balance out the redness a bit. Remember that the most likely areas on your face to burn are also the most likely areas to tan, so if you carefully bronze the forehead, nose and cheekbones it could give you a really natural-looking glow and cover up the sunburn.
Obviously there are different levels of sunburn, and I hope for your and your make-up artists’ sake that if you do get burnt, it’s not bad. If it is bad, take great care of it. Take cooling showers, use the lavender oil trick, lots of moisturiser and after sun, and don’t exfoliate until it’s beginning to heal.
Or just take mine and Baz Luhrmann’s advice and WEAR SUNSCREEN.
Xx HDB xX
First published on weddingvenues.com in Summer 2017
@SaddleStreet 