Now that you’ve seen our amazeballs engagement photos, let’s talk about my face. I used the photo shoot as an opportunity for a makeup trial. There’s a very affordable salon right down the street from me, so I decided to splurge on airbrush makeup.
This is my before—a nakey face and messy hair:
And this is the after:
It looked—I don’t know—fine, I guess. The foundation looked good but not as flawless as I’d hoped. I probably just expected too much. At any rate, my skin looked a lot better than it did when I walked into the salon.
I was kind of unsatisfied with the experience, though.
The first reason was that my stupid birthmark was still showing through!
The second reason was the ordeal that I like to refer to as Lipglossgate. I asked the makeup artist for red lips, but with a stain. A subtle red lip. I was imagining something like Anne Hathaway’s lips—how it looks like she just ate a strawberry popsicle:
Either I didn’t explain myself well enough, or the makeup artist just didn’t get it. I ended up with thick, gooey red gloss that extended well outside of my lip area. Unfortunately (or fortunately for me), no photos exist of that mess. I looked like, as they said on Glee, a sad clown hooker.
I asked her to remove the red gloss and just give me a nude lip. Even then, she glopped the nude gloss on well outside my lip area. And calling it “nude” was a biiiiig stretch. If anything, it was a dark nude, but I’d call it a brown. It reminded me of the Revlon Coffee Bean lipstick I wore in high school. (For those of you who are counting, I’m talking late ’80s to early ’90s.)
But I was running late and had to get to the shoot, so I just left. It was blustery outside, and as soon as I exited the salon, a gust of wind blew and about half of my hair was stuck to my lips. SO gross.
So when I got into my car, I grabbed some napkins from the glove box and scrubbed the goop off of my lips. I reapplied one of my everyday glosses, and I felt much better.
Another thing that bothered me was my eye makeup. It looked fine. But that’s it—it looked just fine. I wanted my eyes to look amazing, beautiful, to pop, and they just didn’t. Again: they looked fine. But I can do fine for free by myself.
I’ve never had my makeup professionally done, so maybe I was just expecting too much. Maybe I’m too picky. Or maybe I got a sub-par makeup job. Who knows? Maybe all I need is to find the perfect foundation, and I can save money by doing my own face on my wedding day.
But all in all, it wasn’t a bad experience. It was just, well, OK.
Were you happy with your makeup trials, or did you have to try several artists to get what you were looking for?