Photo Courtesy of Harry Lawford under Creative Commons
Wedding season has always been a cursed blessing in the styling world. On one hand it's a big boost in business between increased demand and word of mouth, but there's almost no other job that's more stressful and demanding than being the hair stylist on wedding day. Fortunately half of success on these days is in preparation, so here a few things to take care of so your wedding season will go as smoothly as possible.
Discuss Backup Hairstyles
It's not uncommon for last minute hairstyle changes to be necessary. The bride might change her mind about what she wants, or something might might happen to a bridesmaid's hair that you'll need to work around. In both of these cases, they'll expect you to be the miracle worker. While you obviously can't prepare for every whim and disaster, and you don't actually have magic hair powers (despite what they might think), you can come up with a list of five or six different styles with the wedding party. This way you can practice and prepare for that handful of styles to work off of instead of trying to tackle a completely new style that you don't have the tools for.
Practice Your Styles
Laura Kaszoni (better known as Lala's Updos) once told us “the styles don't take hours, the practice does.” That’s good to keep in mind as you prepare. The last thing that should happen on wedding day is the stylist mucking up the hair because she didn't practice her updos enough. And even though you'll (hopefully) start styling everyone many many hours before the ceremony begins, you need to be able to work under a shortened timeline in case someone shows up late, or someone's hair is prematurely messed up. Practice does not make perfect. There is no perfect. But there are different levels of success, and the more you practice, the higher you'll get on that scale.
List the Hair Tools You'll Need
Start taking an inventory of all the hair tools you’ll need to get through the day: combs, sprays, brushes, pins, tiaras, headdresses, crowns,drinks, etc. Leave a space for checks on the side of that list, then make that list your best friend. Tack it to your forehead, go to the sleep with it, take selfies with it and tell it your darkest secrets, so that when the day comes you won't even need to double check that you have everything because you know that list like it's another little you. But you're going to double check it anyway, because shame on you if end up with a lopsided updo because you forget to bring enough pins.
Leave Time for Instragram
There are probably going to be a lot of professional photos of your work taken throughout the day, so you might think this isn't important, but if you've ever had to hire a professional photographer, especially for weddings, you know it can take a long time for those pictures to come back. And even when they do, you're probably not going to get any before photos. So be sure you set aside a minute just before and one right after styling so you can make sure you have decent photos of your work in your own hands. Remember, aside from the hopeful word of mouth you get from this year's clients, these pictures are your ticket to next next year's wedding season.
Visualize the Event
If you've never styled for a wedding before, now would be a good time to start toughening yourself for the madness that is about to consume you. It usually starts out calm enough, but as the sun rises and the in-laws start scrambling around to prepare everything else, the whole event usually tries to fly off the ground, and it will almost certainly not go smoothly. So you need to stay grounded. People will yell at you, criticize your work or the people you're working on, there might be tears of joy, sadness, stress, or confusion or all of the above at the same time from the same person, possibly while sitting in your salon chair. You need to remember that you're on the job. You need to stay calm and professional, if not for their sake, then at least for yours.