Our Wedding - part 1: beauty, health and skincare
Hello beauties!
It has now been 4 very short months since our wedding day! Last year was the best year of our lives, the planning and preparation, to our wedding day and honeymoon. They say it’s the best day of your life and it sure is that.
I wanted to break all the details of our wedding day into two chunks. Part One I will discuss all of the details of my beauty preparation: skincare routine, beauty, hair, health, diet, and fitness. In Part Two I will share all of the details of our day, links to all of our wonderful vendors, a tonne of unseen images and tips for future brides! Part Three will be a honeymoon blog sharing with you guys a detailed travel blog on our honeymoon in Mexico.
Okay so lets get started into Part One…
Skincare
In the lead-up to our wedding I had pre-planned out a skincare routine. Having my skin feeling amazing, bright and smooth was really important to me, I mean I am sure it is important to every bride isn’t it! So in order to ensure this I went and visited Skin Divinity in Byron Bay approximately 4 months before our wedding so that they could do a skin assessment and create a customised pre-wedding skincare plan for me. Skin Divinityis a beautiful clinic and every visit was amazing, literally my skin had never been better! I couldn’t recommend them enough. I’ll share the routine I did, however everyone is different so I highly recommend if you are in the area, you book in to visit the lovely ladies and have your skin assessed and come up with a plan to have your skin feeling amazing!
I had 3 treatments of a cleanse, tone, DERMA-PENtreatment to my face, followed by a cooling mask and LED lights to cool and calm my skin, over the course of the 4 months. They also provided me with a sample pack of Aspect Skincare products to use between treatments (these products are cruelty free/not-tested on animals). DERMA-PEN treatments are a form of micro-needling, which create micro injuries to the epidermis and dermis (outer and inner skin layers). These micro-channels stimulate natural healing processes to occur and the production of new collagen. It is slightly painful but the treatment is fairly quick and the downtime (redness) is only approximately 1-2 days.
Aside from the treatments at Skin Divinity I also did some weekly sheet masks (inspired by my trip to South Korea – the beauty capital of the world) and my at home skin-care routine consisted of cleansing twice daily (I used my Aspect Gentle Facial Cleanser as well as OSEA - Ocean Cleanser from Follain), moisturising and using serums (Osmosis Renew- Vitamin A, Ursa Major- Vitamin C Serum, Aspect- Hydrating Serum and The Abnormal Beauty Company - Rosehip Oil).
All these products are cruelty free by the way :)
I would have loved to trial the EPI-blading treatment. EPI-blading is a treatment that Skin Divinity recommend for brides as the tiny blade not only removes a layer of dead skin off your face but also removes the tiny hairs which as a result makes your makeup look better. However, this needed to be trialled a couple of weeks before the wedding and we were overseas.
My skin was the BEST it’s ever been after my skin care routine and appointments with Skin Divinity in Byron Bay. I had a mask and LED lights on the Tuesday and Thursday before our wedding, so my face was feeling extra glowy.
Aside from skincare, I also changed up my diet – which I will detail in the next sections, but I do firmly believe our diet plays a pivotal role in our outer skin complexion. I followed a low carb/low sugar and high healthy fat diet, more on this later...
Hair/Beauty
For my wedding I wanted my hair long and wanted to maintain my bangs. I kept my hair healthy all year by having a trim every 3-4 months and onlyhad my hair dyed (and cut) a week out from the wedding at my hairdresser on the Gold Coast (The Loft, Mermaid Beach). By hair is fair and I have a natural balayage, so I didn’t want to change it much by over-bleaching it, instead I just had some foils throughout my hair (but not from the roots), that way I still had a natural look but it just brightened it up.
The day prior to the wedding we had our lashes filled by my favourite lady, Taylor from Byron Bay Lashes. She does an amazing job at making my lashes feel fuller but still so natural. They are soo much softer than any other eye-lash extensions I have had before, and of course they are cruelty free/vegan. I still get my eyelashes done by Taylor when I am home in Australia because she does such an amazing job, couldn’t recommend her enough.
I opted not to have a spray tan. I have actually never had one so I didn’t want to get on for the day in case I hated it. Living in Bali and travelling so much, I do have a natural tan, so on the day I just used some gold shimmery Gypsy Oil to make me feel all glowy and bronzed.
Diet
Goals:
So yes, I will be honest with you guys, I did want to loose 1-2kgs (not much!). Prior to this I had been travelling quite a bit and between travels I do like to calorie control and increase my workouts since while I am travelling I like to enjoy myself; have some treats, some cocktails, less healthy foods and snacks, and workout less. It’s not always easy to maintain a really healthy diet when travelling and some days I don’t manage to get a proper workout in. This is why I like to have breaks between travelling to have some routine and health goals.
In the lead up to our wedding, from about 3-4 months out, I changed up my diet as I wanted to feel amazing and feel a bit more lean. I don’t know why we put all this pressure on ourselves to ‘shred for the wed’ but theres something about the pre-wedding preparations and the fact that youll be standing in front of everyone you know and love showing your love and vulnerabilities that makes you feel the need to look and feel your absolute best.
I am a healthy weight and do eat a very wholesome plant-based diet, however I am a health nerd and love setting myself goals and challenges within my health so I was excited to have this ‘wed shred’ challenge with Alex. We didn’t have any particular numbers or rules we wanted to meet (sometimes having these ideas and numbers in our heads can result in a negative psychological effect when you don’t reach your goals) but basically we both just wanted to look and feel the best we ever have. Also, importantly, when you are working out a lot more you may not see the number on the scale go down, it might even go up. This is because muscle density is higher than fat hence you may be loosing fat and gaining muscle and therefore increasing in weight while becoming more lean.
We basically just knew that if we were eating well and working out regularly - even if we looked the same to everyone else, we knew we would just feel overall better which at the end of the day is all that mattered. We both felt fit and healthy and it was just so nice to do it together.
Keto/Low Carb Diet:
You may have already read my two blog posts about my Vegan Keto Diet that I trialled? Well that was about 4-5 months out from our wedding, and I wanted to do this to see how it effected me and to see if it was something I would like to pursue in the lead up to the wedding. I experimented with it early as I didn’t want to make any huge diet changes within the 3 months and have an adverse reaction. From my Keto Trial I did discover that my skin complexion was amazing and I had little to no breakouts, except after re-introducing simple carbohydrates rapidly (e.g. eating chocolate after being on a really low-carb diet) where I had these crazy breakouts over my face and chest of these tiny white heads, it was almost like a reaction or intolerance and it subsided after a few days but it was really interesting. But since my complexion was great on this diet and it made me need to home prepare all my meals, I decided to stick to a low carb (not quite keto) diet in the lead up.
Basically the only drastic changes to my diet were: no bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice, low fruit intake, no treats or sugary foods, lots of leafy greens, higher protein and of course lots of healthy fats (avocado, coconut, olives, olive oil, macadamias, tahini, peanut butter, etc).
Every morning after my workout I would have a mini smoothie using our Ultimate Smoothie Blends (we had our samples at this stage) that I would blend with only half a banana and some almond milk and MCT oil. This was a great post workout carbohydrate hit (still quite a low carb snack) and good amount of plant protein to help my muscles recover. I do also think that the herbal mushrooms in our blends were making me feel really amazing too.
Around mid after-noon I was mainly having a small homemade salad/buddha bowl with lots of leafy greens, avocado, hemp seeds, tofu, pumpkin, and olive oil + Tamari dressing (simple to the Green Bowl in our Vegan Keto ebook).
Around dinnertime I would cook a different kind of healthy/lower carb meal. Sometimes it was bun-less veggie burgers, salads, stir-fry, konjac noodle pho, or tofu scramble.
Intermittent fasting:
I was also ensuring not to overconsume calories. To do this, I wasn’t obsessively counting calories, (occasionally just logging a days intake to ensure I wasn’t overconsuming), but instead I was following a modified 16-8 intermittent fast. I would have a coffee in the morning (black or with MCT oil), hence not truly fasting, go do a workout for 60-90 minutes and then break my fast around mid-day. Ultimately if you want to shift some weight, a calorie deficit is the only way to drop weight, and in order for me to do this, Intermittent Fasting worked best with my lifestyle.
Alcohol:
The other change we made to our diets was alcohol. Alex and myself are not big drinkers, not even weekly drinkers but when we are travelling or have family/friends visiting or special occasions we will have a few drinks. We decided in the lead up to our wedding we would avoid alcohol all together (except for our bucks and hen’s parties). I find even just 1 drink can make me wake up feeling a bit sluggish or less than 100% and unmotivated for the day, so this simple change definitely made me feel much healthier and motivated.
Fitness:
F45 & Gym
Fitness is another part of our preparations that we did. I absolutely love feeling fit and healthy and so working out is a huge part of my lifestyle. My workout routine in the lead up to our wedding didn’t differ too much from our usual routine in Bali, but during the lead-up to our wedding we were really dedicated to working out consistently 5-6 days per week. Even going for an extra couple of sessions, it was a great extra bit of motivation and Alex and I could have fun and do it together. We also made sure we didn’t have any travels/trips in the 1-2 months leading up to our wedding as we always end up eating less healthy and skipping workouts when we travel.
My workout routine consisted of roughly:
- HIIT training 5 x per week
- Weight training 2 x per week
- Cardio 6 x per week
- Rest 1-2 x per week (really important to not burn out or get sick and give your muscles a day or two to recover and repair.)
HIIT came from F45 classes that I regularly attended, circuits I did at the gym, and the Sweat App.
Cardio from F45 classes, running on the treadmill, stationary bike, and x-trainer.
Weights from F45 classes and hand weights at the gym.
I also did strength/floor work from Sweat App and YouTube workouts from Pam - if you haven’t tried her workouts I highly recommend them (link below)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChVRfsT_ASBZk10o0An7Ucg
Well that sums up the first blog post for our wedding - beauty, health and skincare!
If you have any particular questions please ask below! remember our complete wedding, vendors list and tonnes of images and inspiration will be in the next blog coming in the next 1-2 weeks!!
Elsa
xx