I don't wear makeup but my wedding is coming up – can I go bare-faced?

The Guardian

19-03-2025

Hi Ugly,
I haven't worn makeup in years but my wedding is coming up in November and I'm facing a lot of pressure to wear it (from friends, my mum and my sisters – not my partner). I want to stand by the idea that my natural face is formal enough. I really want to cry, laugh and hug without worrying about smudging my face. But I worry about being 'underdressed' at my own wedding. I'm sure even our celebrant will look more glam than me.
Is going bare-faced to my own wedding too radical for people to understand? Should I encourage other people to go natural in my dress code?
– Bare-Faced Bride
According to a recent article in Allure, 'wedding day makeup should be 'you, but enhanced''.
Ahem. This is also the promise of The Substance.
I don't think it's unfair to compare our cultural obsession with bridal glam to the 2024 body horror blockbuster, in which the main character uses a black market cosmetic injectable to create a 'more beautiful, more perfect' version of herself. I'd argue that wedding day beauty has indeed devolved into its own brand of body horror. On the big day, the average bride spends about $300 to transform her ordinary flesh into something worthy of photographic immortalization – very Dorian Gray! – although wedding makeup can reach the 'extortionate' price of $1,500.
Prep might begin as much as a year in advance. 'I've worked with countless brides wanting perfect skin on their wedding day, and they're always surprised to learn how early we need to get to work,' writes New York-based aesthetician Sofie Pavitt. For those with large pores, for instance, she recommends occasionally inflicting thousands of one-millimeter wounds on the skin to force regeneration (microneedling) and/or penetrating its moisture barrier with fractional laser beams (Clear + Brilliant) over a period of 12 months. This will ensure that 'makeup sits beautifully and lasts all day', she says.
Popular day-of tips encourage the affianced to defy the laws of physics by letting their 'skin shine through [their] makeup' and turning their 'own natural beauty up to 'medium''.
But it's possible for a bride to spare no financial or temporal investment and just feel '8/10 happy … pretty good' about her nuptial glam. Take Emily Weiss, founder of the ultimate 'you but better' beauty brand, Glossier, who detailed the extensive pre-wedding routine for her 'limbs, skin, wanted hair, unwanted hair, nails, muscles, digestive tract, lashes and brows' on her beauty blog, Into The Gloss. Or she may look so wonderful getting married that she 'never feel[s] pretty again', as influencer Thea Vaporis joked in an Instagram post juxtaposing her normal, makeup-free face with the fully made-up face from her wedding photos.
With outcomes like these, why bother? Why put so much effort into making your face different from the face that was proposed to, the one that will remain married? Why is matrimonial metamorphosis so normalized, expected – even, in your case, encouraged?
It might have something to do with the patriarchal history of marriage as property exchange. From about 1300 to 1800 AD, women were treated as assets and traded to secure wealth. (To wit: The Knot claims 'Old Money Makeup' is the number one wedding beauty trend of 2025.) Today, most women can choose who and why they marry, but marriage is still seen as 'a major marker of success', Elise Hu, the author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, told me earlier this month. 'That pursuit and performance of success extends to the body and the face.'
In the TikTok era, these performative aspects of a wedding get dialed up to 11.
'Social media is the fuel to the fire when it comes to the increasing demand surrounding wedding beauty products, services and advice,' Business of Fashion reports, noting that the arrival of image-focused apps in the 2010s is associated with doubled budgets and increased pressure from peers to put together a picture-perfect wedding.
Makeup artist Saskia Wright told Business of Fashion that more brides are requesting pictures of themselves peering into a compact, admiring their own wedding makeup. The final image doesn't portray the person, but their mirror image, captured with a camera lens – which is then seen through the screen of a smartphone. It's a doppelganger to the power of three, which strikes me as an apt metaphor for your situation. If you do decide to wear makeup to your wedding, would you be doing it for yourself – or the version of yourself surveilled by society, sublimated into the symbolic bride, and preserved in a virtual scrapbook?
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Which self do you want to prioritize?
Isn't it important to consciously experience such a significant day without worrying about what that experience looks like?
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I agree with you: it is radical to get married without makeup in 2025. It's radical to choose embodied freedom – your ability to 'cry, laugh and hug' without regard for running mascara – over performance as a bride. It might be hard for your community to understand, but 200 years ago, so was marrying for love! People did it anyway. I think you should do this, too. You want to. Your partner loves you as-is. Go for it.
If it makes you feel more comfortable, tell your celebrant, family, friends and wedding party that you'll be makeup-free ahead of time to help them gauge their own glam level. Let them adjust to your preferences, not the other way around.
Sure, there's a possibility that you'll regret looking 'underdressed' at your own wedding. But I think there's just as good a chance that you'll feel '8/10 happy' as you, unenhanced – no Substance-level transformation required.