January tends to be a super busy time for wedding planners, and for anyone getting married. And hey, maybe you or a loved one got engaged over the holidays and have started planning a wedding (good on ya!) or perhaps you’ve got a summer wedding planned. Maybe you’ve got a stacked wedding season coming up thanks to the pandemic.
Brides, grooms, their close family and wedding party members often ask us about the best timeline to prep for the big day. What schedule do we recommend for pre-wedding beauty treatments, how much should some of them be spaced apart, and which ones should be scheduled closest to the day of the event?
Here’s our guide to get you wedding ready.
How soon before the wedding should you get Botox?
It’s probably the most popular treatment, with good reason—Botox is the little miracle worker that can do so much. Because it can treat such a wide range of different concerns, it’s probably the most asked about wedding day treatment for everyone, from the bride and groom, to parents, bridesmaids, and guests of all kinds.
What you need to know: as a rule of thumb, Botox kicks in two weeks after your treatment. So if you’re an experienced Botox patient, meaning you’ve had enough injections that you and your injector know the treatment plan that works best for the look you want, then two weeks in advance is the right time for you to schedule it.
If you’re a Botox first-timer and your event is a little further out, you might want to give it a test run and schedule your first appointment sooner as it can take a little time to figure out the perfect dosage. Your injector will listen to your concerns and create a plan tailored to what you want to achieve. When you come back for your follow up appointment two weeks later, they’ll be able to evaluate how your Botox is settling and work with you to make any tweaks to perfect the look.
Sometimes those tweaks require a few more injections to relax another area of muscles. You might also feel that the dosage was a little high, so your injector will know to scale it back for your subsequent treatments. These types of tiny adjustments are part of the process and will help you find your ideal dose, which will fit you like your favourite pair of jeans—super comfortable, leaving you feeling totally like yourself.
The effects of Botox and other neurotoxins wear off after about 3 or 4 months, and you’ll know it’s happening when you see a lot of movement returning. Depending on how much time you have, you can plan your first treatment some months in advance and get a feel for the dosage. If you’re in more of a time crunch, you can still make it work with 3-4 weeks notice to give yourself some room for any necessary tweaks to settle. And if you’re not sure, give us a call! We can help you figure it out.
Filler Injections Before Your Wedding Day
Whether you want a little more volume in your lips, or to create a more sculpted chin or cheek, or if you’re looking to restore a little lost volume in the face, dermal fillers are another very popular wedding treatment.
If your big event is coming up really soon, you can probably get away with getting your filler two weeks in advance. That’s can sometimes be pushing it a little bit, depending whether or not you typically experience swelling or bruising with these kinds of injections.
Ideally, though, you’d schedule your appointment at least four weeks in advance. That way we have the opportunity to make sure everything is picture perfect and, in the rare event of a minor complication, we’ll have time to treat it or correct it, which can sometimes require dissolving the filler (more about that here).
The other good news is that filler has great longevity. So if you feel overwhelmed with everything on the go and want to book your appointment a little earlier to accommodate your plans, that should be no problem.
You Don’t Need to Wait to Get Facial Peels
Is your wedding a year from now? 6 months? 3 months? Great! Get a peel treatment today 😉
Seriously though, peel treatments are amazing. If they’re not part of your routine yet, it’s a great time to get started. They can do all kinds of amazing things, like improve the overall feel and quality of the skin, treat acne or melasma, reduce the appearance of age spots, sun damage and freckles, and leave you with an amazing glow.
At MD Beauty Clinic, they’re also basically a super relaxing spa facial treatment. You get 45 minutes to relax and unwind while your face is treated to a completely customized skincare regimen, from the super active (chemical exfoliants like lactic, glycolic or salicylic acid) to the super soothing (clay mask, botanical oils, stem cell serums… whatever your skin needs most).
One of the other reasons our peel treatments are so popular is that you can grab one on your lunch break and return to work looking fresh and glowing, not red or raw.
If you get started with regular peels ASAP you’ll start to see great results in the quality of your skin over the weeks and months that follow. Then you can book a peel for the day before your wedding to have the ultimate fresh glow just in time.
For a More Transformative Wedding-Ready Skin Treatment
If you have around four months or more and you want some very WOW skin results, you might want to book a package of Morpheus8 treatments. It’s the kind of skin treatment that can work for pretty much everyone, and it treats all kinds of skin concerns, including fine lines and wrinkles, skin laxity, acne and acne scarring, textural irregularities, hyperpigmentation, sun damage and dark spots, and even stretch marks.
We’re not joking. If you have a skin concern, Morpheus8 can probably treat it. It even contours and remodels the skin. It’s also a really amazing treatment to create an airbrushed effect on the skin in real life—pretty ideal for wedding photos.
It’s a super powerful tool, and because of this, it does require a little social downtime after treatment. You might experience redness, swelling or bruising, and possibly some tiny red raised bumps as a result of the microneedling component. Typically these side effects resolve and heal within 1-3 days.
You’ll see noticeable improvements to your skin quality a few days after your treatment, and skin tightening within the first month. You’ll typically see the best results after a series of three treatments, and when those are complete, your results will only continue to improve as your skin continues to build new collagen. We often recommend a series of 3 treatments spaced 4-6 weeks apart.
Essentially you’d just want to make sure you have enough time after your final treatment to really see the full effects in time for your wedding day, so starting 4-6 months in advance might be your best plan.
