4 Tips for Dressing a Bride on a Budget

Planning a wedding is expensive. Your wedding dress alone is likely to run your wedding budget into the thousands of dollars alone. Yikes!

If you have opted to go without a wedding planner, you have a long road ahead of you. Aside from arranging your bridal party’s outfits and makeup and your spouse’s clothing, you also are tasked with arranging your clothing and makeup. You can see, then, how costs can quickly get out of hand if you don’t take the time to plan ahead.

Don’t get stuck concentrating on your bridal party and let your own wardrobe fall through the cracks until the last minute, because you will get stuck paying a pretty penny. Here are 4 tips to dress and makeover yourself on a tight budget.

Lipstick as a Multistick

Did you know that you can use your lipstick as a blush as well? Satin, pearl, and cream finish lipsticks work fabulously as a blusher.

However, blush and lipstick are not created equally. You can always add, but it is harder to take away pigment, so you should use a light hand initially and experiment before the big day so you know how much lipstick it takes to get the color payoff you need.

Lipstick tends to be oilier so it will slip off the skin more easily than blusher, which is made to withstand the oils your skin secretes. You can remove some of this extraneous oiliness by applying the lipstick to the back of your hand first and then transferring the pigment to your cheek via a brush.

The less contact the pigment has with human skin, the less chances our body’s natural oils will be able to break the pigment down and disperse it. So only apply it to the back of your hand and a brush before it reaches your cheek.

Another tip: never press the tube of lipstick directly to your cheek, because it will lift any makeup you are already wearing including foundation.

Learn to Sew—No, Really

I know what you are thinking: who needs ANOTHER chore before their wedding day? But learning to sew is actually not as difficult or as time intensive as you may think!

According to the bridal shop, lovebrideboutique.com, “A few simple sewing tricks can dramatically change the way a garment sits on the body. Plus, knowing how to sew in a pinch comes in handy for burst seams, frayed edges, or simple hem work. On the day of your wedding, you won’t want to waste time googling how to mend a burst seam.”

Imagine finding the perfect dress at your favorite bridal shop that flatters all of your problem areas…except for one. If you knew how to sew, you could fix that problem in less than an afternoon!

Plus, sewing is just a useful skill to have for a lifetime. Especially if you are thinking of having children with your future spouse: being able to stitch up an expensive garment on the fly is going to be a godsend.

Stick to a Color Palette

If you have forgone the traditional white wedding, you are in luck. You can still signal to your guests with visual that you and your beloved are linked by sharing a color or even a color palette. You will want to specify to your guests to avoid these colors.

Similarly, you can match your bridesmaids in this same fashion…or differentiate yourself from them with this method. Maybe you and your bridesmaids can agree on a style of dress, like an asymmetrical cut, or a color palette, like pastels or lavender hues, that they wear, and you will wear a strong departure from that to visually cue your difference.

This opens up the options for you and your bridesmaids when it comes time to choose a dress. The most budget friendly option is for choose items you already have in their closet, and a color palette opens up a lot of opportunities for your own jewelry collection to make the cut without having to shell out extra cash.

If you are the type of bride that prefers to have more, rather than less, control over the appearance of yourself and your visual relation to your bridal party, this might not be a great option.

However, if you really are lax about your bridesmaids and groomsmen, you can keep it light. Maybe they just share an elaborate style of updo or have the same color hair accessory. The choices are endless. The point is to have fun!

Stay Away from SPF

Regardless of the style of makeup you choose, if you take it upon yourself to style yourself, you need to stay far away from sunscreen protection in your makeup.

While it is a good idea to wear sunscreen on a regular basis, sunscreen actually inhibits your photographer’s job.

SPF will lead to flashback in photos, which is the phenomena where light bounces off the protective SPF particles and reflects back in the camera. When you see pictures of people with a lot of white powder beneath their eyes, this is because they have used powders, concealers, or foundation with SPF in it.