Beauty Picks
Spring Bridal Makeup with Victoria Radford: Fresh Faced
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With wedding season just around the corner, the Spring months are the perfect time to start booking your wedding makeup trials. WedLuxe spoke exclusively with celebrity makeup artist Victoria Radford about how to achieve glowing skin and classic, natural bridal makeup, which she demonstrated on model, bride-to-be and star of the W Network’s Hockey Wives, Martine Forget! Read on for tips and tricks on how to achieve the look that will leave your natural beauty enhanced and luminous.
According to Radford, it’s important to start a good skincare regimen at least 6 months before the big day. “It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, it just has to be consistent. The biggest rule, no matter how hard it is, is do not pick at your face,” Victoria notes. She suggests leaving that to the professionals and getting regular facials with someone whom you trust in the months before your wedding. A brightening mask is great to use before putting on makeup, as it will take down any redness or inflammation and give your skin an extra glow. Victoria and team used their Radford 24K Gold Biocellulose Mask on Martine before applying makeup.
It’s important to prep your skin before applying makeup, as this is what will ultimately make it last. Victoria ensures that skin is clean and moisturized first, and notes that hydration is huge! After their biocellulose mask, she applied put her RAD balm on Martine’s skin, letting the moisturizer settle in for a few minutes before applying foundation. She advises that if you are not usually a “foundation person,” using a damp beauty blender, such as the original beautyblender, you should push the product into the skin, which will make any foundation look more natural and allow your skin to appear impossibly perfect. This technique also makes your makeup last longer, to withstand an evening full of dancing at your reception.
To make the whites of your eyes pop and enhance your natural eye colour, Victoria uses a waterproof pencil in the water line. For this, pick a colour that is blue, white, or icy pink. “It won’t look like much to the naked eye, but in photographs, it’s a great way to brighten and widen the eyes,” she reveals, and recommends the waterproof Aqua XL liner in turquoise by Make Up For Ever for this.
The most important part of the natural look is an emphasis on long, fluttery, natural-looking eyelashes. Individual false eyelashes are the trick to make you look polished but not overdone, and Radford believes this step goes a long way to make the natural bride feel more glamorous while still looking like herself. After this step, she adds mascara. Victoria advises, “when you are applying mascara after individual eyelashes, think about stamping the mascara at the base of your lashes, rather than swiping the mascara through your full lashes.” This trick defines the base, but keeps the ends feathery, achieving the desired natural look.
Next, Victoria used a pink concealer on Martine to neutralize the darkness under her eyes. “Colour correction is essential when achieving a natural look, because it actually allows you to use less product, therefore minimizing the chance of your skin looking ‘cakey’,” she explains. Radford suggests that instead of piling on layers of foundation or powders, using the right colour to correct dark or dull spots will avoid the feeling of having too much makeup on.
According to Radford, “brows are not creative, they are mathematical. If you stick to the same structure, you will always look polished and natural.” For beginners, the easiest tool to use is a tinted brow gel. On Martine, she used the Radford Brow Gel in Blonde Lites. For this, the technique is to gently feather the brow gel onto your existing brows. You can also use a shadow or brow pencil to fill out brows or fill in uneven spots.
To get a flawless, sun-kissed look (a wedding day must!), Victoria suggests applying a bronzer using the Rule of Three: Dust your brush along your hairline, along the hollows of your cheeks and on the underside of your jaw, thus drawing a rough outline of the number 3 on your face. For Martine’s glowing look, she used Radford’s Mineral Sheer Bronzer in Rio De Janeiro. With the same bronzer, take a fluffy eyeshadow brush and dust the product in the crease of your eye. Victoria reveals that this opens your eye, giving the illusion of what she calls a ‘mini eye lift.’
Using your favourite blush (she used Radford Baked Blush in Honeybell, dust this colour onto the apples of your cheeks. Then, take your highlighter (Radford and team love Laura Mercier’s blush in “Ballet Pink” as a highlighter) and apply to the parts of your face where the light naturally hits – along your cheekbones, on the bridge of your nose, on your cupid’s bow, in the tear ducts of your eyes and on your brow bone. This illuminates your skin and goes a long way in making your skin look bright and luminous in photographs.
Victoria decided to keep Martine’s lips neutral with only a hint of colour. She used a nude lip liner (Radford lip liner in Naked) and her Radford Lip Toxyl, which is a special lip treatment that uses dehydrated peptides to plump lips and give them a juicy feel.
As the final step in this makeup routine, she suggests that you powder areas that you find get oily with a translucent setting powder or a tinted powder (which provides a little more coverage) to set the look. On Martine, she used Radford’s Soft Focus Powder in Vanilla.
Thank you Victoria Radford for sharing these amazing tips for a fresh faced look exclusively with WedLuxe.com! Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of this Spring wedding beauty series!
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Photography • Steph Martyniuk of White Spruce Wedding Photography
