There is a particular kind of panic that comes with choosing your bridal makeup artist. Get it wrong, and you risk anything from mismatched expectations and last-minute cancellations to makeup that overwhelms your features or simply leaves you feeling unlike yourself. This is the face you’ll see in every wedding photograph for decades to come, and the artist putting on that face is also the person with whom you’ll spend some of the most emotional hours of your wedding day. So how do you know they’re the right fit for you?
Every bride in this story began where most brides do: Instagram. But while social media helped shortlist artists, none of them made their final decision there. Designer Amreen Sandhu found herself looking beyond dramatic transformations and perfectly lit portraits. “The biggest thing I searched for was whether every bride still looked like herself, rather than one signature face repeated on everyone.” As someone who spends her life thinking about silhouette, balance and proportion, she wasn’t searching for the strongest aesthetic but the most adaptable one, someone whose makeup could elevate rather than compete with the craftsmanship of her wedding wardrobe.
London-based dentist and content creator Kavita Ravi-Shankar took an equally unconventional approach. Instead of studying still photographs, she watched videos, paying attention to how artists interacted with brides rather than how they blended foundation. “I think you spend so much of your day with a makeup artist, just you and them,” she says. “I was looking at whether they were laughing with the bride, how they spoke to her, whether they felt warm.”
For content creator Karmaa Dhir Dhingra, the decision had been made years before she got engaged, when makeup artist Shraddha Luthra chose her as the muse for one of her editorial beauty looks. Watching her work up close mattered far more than following her feed. “I literally told her then that whenever I get married, you’re going to be my first phone call.”
Interestingly, despite their very different weddings, every bride arrived at the same brief: they wanted to look recognisably like themselves. For filmmaker Karishma Kohli, who has vitiligo, that meant finding someone who understood that makeup wasn’t about erasing her skin. “I just had to find a way where I found an artist who would let my skin just be,” she says. Having spent years trying to conceal first the white patches and later the brown ones, she had finally reached a place where she wanted neither hidden. Her makeup artist understood that restraint, not coverage, was the greater skill. “If you look at my wedding photographs, you can see the browns on my face because she’s not done a very heavy job.”
Dhir Dhingra was chasing a similar feeling for different reasons. “I wanted it to look like I’ve done my makeup, but in a cleaner, more polished camera-friendly manner.” She wanted to consciously avoid heavy lashes, dramatic contouring and trend-led bridal makeup, preferring what she describes as a timeless, almost French approach. Sandhu echoes that philosophy from a design perspective. “Choose someone whose work you still admire when you remove the lashes, jewellery and bridal outfit from the picture. Great makeup should stand on its own.
What surprised almost every bride was that choosing a makeup artist had as much to do with communication as it did with cosmetics. Sandhu skipped a trial altogether because conversations with her artist gave her enough confidence that they were creatively aligned. Ravi- Shankar, meanwhile, met her makeup artist over coffee while shopping for her bridal wardrobe in Mumbai. “She just got all the looks that I wanted,” she says. More importantly, “she helped me with every step of the way, even matching bangles to my outfits.” The relationship quickly expanded beyond beauty into styling, jewellery and colour palettes. “It wasn’t just about my makeup.”
