Bridal Style: Q&A With Event Planner Susanna Stewart

Images by Muguet Photography

I loved planning our wedding, but did I love every step of the process? Not really, and ours was relatively small and simple (park ceremony, restaurant reception, 60-70 guests). I can't even imagine how overwhelming it must be to put together an event from scratch on a much bigger scale, or how daunting of a process wedding planning can be if you feel as though you're the only bride-to-be who's lacking the organization gene! Luckily, professional planners like Susanna Stewart Events are here to save the day. I caught up with Susanna recently and asked about her passion for event and wedding planning, as well as tips for brides-to-be on how to choose and work with a planner and how to de-stress before the big day. More after the jump!

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Bridal Style: Hair Extensions Q&A With Veronica Gomes

Fine-hair genes, styling damage, trauma, hormones: there are a host of reasons why a girl's hair might not be as long and luxuriant as she wants on her wedding day. Luckily though, hair extensions are a quick and easy way to achieve the tresses of one's dreams. I've never tried extensions myself (I just grew my hair out for my own wedding day updo), but Veronica Gomes wears and works with them all the time. Gomes, a Vancouver-based hairstylist, boasts 12 years of experience and launched an eponymous line of hair extensions last fall featuring 11 shades (including 2 different shades of black, one warmer and one darker), 3 lengths, and 2 quality levels, so it's safe to say she's an extension guru and I learned a lot from this interview. Brides-to-be who are looking for more length or volume, take note!

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Bridal Style: 6 Easy Ways To Look & Feel Your Best

Photos by Stephen K. Lee

When I was engaged, one of the most surprising things was how ubiquitous talk of pre-wedding prep could be. There's definitely social pressure to look your best on a day where you'll squeeze into a wedding gown and pose for hundreds of photos and and be the centre of attention. Personally speaking, I wasn't looking to achieve a dramatic before/after transformation, but I did use the wedding as an incentive to change habits for the better. These lifestyle tweaks are common sense even if they're not common practice, they're fairly easy to incorporate, and they'll yield noticeable results if you start from day one of your engagement. Best of all, these are the sorts of habits you'll want to keep up long after the wedding is done.

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Our Wedding

Photos by Stephen K. Lee

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I couldn't let January pass without a look back at what was the highlight of my 2016. Our wedding on Saturday September 10, 2016, is a memory I'll always cherish and writing this post brought it all back. Admittedly there are a lot of photos and I practically wrote an essay about my experience of the day at the very end (how self-indulgent of me), but if you scroll waaaaay down you can find a full list of our vendors—just in case you're planning your nuptials and want a little help. Enjoy!

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Bridal Style: Seriously West Coast Stagette

There comes a time in every young woman's life when her idea of a good time shifts from stumbling around downtown hotspots to a quiet evening at home, from free shots lined up at a bar to a glass of wine in an upscale lounge. That shift happened for me right around my 25th birthday, so I knew for my stagette I didn't want to do anything too crazy, just enjoy laid-back and fun quality time with my favourite girls. My maid of honour more than came through by planning a weekend getaway to Bowen Island. Just a 20-odd minute ferry ride from Vancouver's Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, Bowen Island feels a world away from the city. Here's a little look at what we did, in case you also want a decidedly more chill bachelorette party.

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Bridal Style: Stepping Up My Skincare

We're at T minus two months until our wedding day, which means it's crunch time for all the last-minute nuptial details, but at the same time, it's still far away enough that any oomph I add to my pre-wedding skincare routine now will pay off in dividends. The products I'm incorporating into my current regimen are all natural (bonus!)—highly effective but gentle enough to not trigger any adverse reactions. My MO? Hydrated, glowing, radiant, even-toned skin.

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Bridal Style: Pre-Wedding Skincare Q&A With Collective Skincare's Kathryn Sawers

For years now, I've entrusted Kathryn Sawers when it comes to facials. Kathryn boasts 14+ years in the skincare and spa industry, and her spa-in-shop Collective Skincare (located upstairs at BeautyMark) takes a holistic approach by addressing diet and lifestyle factors as well as skincare. Facials at Collective aren't just facials: depending on the treatment, they often involve potent natural products (they're the only ones to do Tata Harper facials in Vancouver), acupuncture, and facial massage. With such a breadth of experience and knowledge, I had to pick Kathryn's brain about getting one's complexion ready for the big day. Consider this Q&A everything you've ever wanted to know about bridal skincare!

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Bridal Style: The One Piece Of Advice Wedding Magazines Won't Tell You

These Bridal Style columns may focus on all the fun aspects of planning your wedding, but today's post is a little more serious. As longtime readers know, the boy and I got engaged almost two years ago. I started planning our nuptials during the fall and winter. And then the boy hit a very bad case of burnout, forcing us to postpone the wedding to a to-be-determined date. Dealing with the emotional fallout from that was one of the most difficult things we've done as a couple, but if there's a silver lining, it's that the experience strengthened our bond and assured us that we have what it takes to make it in the long haul. We resumed the planning process in January and set a new wedding date for this September (yay!). But I haven't been as eager to document everything online because, to be honest, I haven't actually been that pre-occupied with wedding stuff.

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Bridal Style: Stuart Weitzman Bridal Shoe Collection

Some wedding decisions come after lots of agonizing, while others fall into place so easily they might as well be kismet. Choosing to buy my wedding day shoes from the Stuart Weitzman Bridal Collection was both a stroke of serendipity and a no-brainer. It had just occurred to me that I needed to shop for the shoes before I could get my dress altered when, lo and behold, there was the press release in my inbox with the most perfect collection of bridal shoes I'd ever seen—something for every type of wedding, dress, and bride imaginable.

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Bridal Style: The Groom's Gift Watch

A keepsake watch, given as a gift, often marks a special occasion: a graduation or a new job, or in the case of Chinese tradition, a marriage. I've always loved the Chinese custom of the bride giving the groom a nice watch on their wedding day. After all, if the bride gets a sparkly engagement ring, the groom should have something too! Needless to say, the boy is all for this custom—so much so that he's been ogling watches since before our engagement. It was a sit-down with Rado Switzerland representatives though—and not a jewelry store visit—that introduced me to this luxe Swiss brand.

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Bridal Style: Etsy For All Things Wedding-Related

1. Paper wheel backdrop ($140) | 2. Terrarium ($125) | 3. Bridal headpiece ($250) |
4. Noisemakers ($173.67 for 100) | 5. Cake topper ($35) | 6. Honey wedding favours |
7. Bridesmaids' necklaces ($126)

One of the up sides of postponing our wedding is the luxury of being able to really savour the planning process. And by "savour the process," I mean getting sucked into Etsy, ogling all sorts of pretty things. Seriously, what did busy brides-to-be ever do before Etsy? Everything one could ever want for a wedding—from decor and party favours to craft supplies and bridal accessories—is just a click away, making it a cinch to plan/browse/shop during workday lunch breaks.

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Bridal Style: Wedding Planning Update

Shopping for a reception dress at BHLDN

The boy and I just came back from a weekend getaway to Seattle where we danced with touring mambo pros from Southern California (including a couple of world champions!), ate plenty of great Mexican food, and wandered around hipper-than-thou Ballard. (If you go to Seattle all the time and have never ventured out of the downtown core/Pike Place Market/outlet shopping trifecta, do yourself a favour and explore this hidden gem.) All of this is a fancy way of saying we had no time to shoot outfit photos, which is why I'm doing a Bridal Style post today. The wedding planning took a backseat to the whirlwind holiday season, but now that it's out of the way, we're slowly getting back into the swing of things. Here's a glimpse via Instagram.

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Bridal Style: Beautiful Brows

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the eyebrows are the all-important frame, and on a bride's big day, this frame had better be in tip-top shape—for photos, loving gazes, warm smiles, and every moment in between. I recently had the chance to pick the brain of Blink Brow Bar owner Kiran Darred for her tips on how to get the best brows possible. Because brows grow so slowly, her advice starts as early as 6 months in advance, which means if you have a summer wedding like I do you better sit up and pay attention. (And hey, even if you're not getting married, good brows never hurt anyone, right? The advice still applies.) More after the jump!

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Bridal Style: Luxurious Lashes

Photo by Stephen K. Lee

When it comes to a bride's big day (or the holiday party circuit, for that matter), few makeup tricks can rival the allure of long, luscious lashes. After all, with the right lashes a woman can go from doe-eyed beauty to glam vixen in a heartbeat. Strip lashes and lash extensions are usually the way to go if you want to achieve high drama and maximum impact. And thanks to some new ultra-luxurious lash services in Vancouver, I recently had a chance to further explore the pros and cons of each method.

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Bridal Style: Wedding Planning So Far

Don't worry, this blog won't turn into a Bridezilla-tainted place. But that being said, it has been 2 months since I announced our engagement, and when I'm not thinking about work or the blog or plans for next weekend, my attention is focused on planning our big day. I've got some fun wedding/bridal content in the works, which I'm kicking off with a status update on how our own nuptial planning is going. More details after the jump!

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