The Bridal 'Look'

Last Wednesday I got a call from a number I didn't recognise. I nearly didn't answer it, because I was certain it might be one of those stupid automated calls telling me that I could claim back money on missold PPI, for that loan and credit card I don't have.

But I did answer it, and good job too. It was the lovely ladies over at Eternal Bride, telling me that my wedding dress had arrived. So last Saturday I got the chance to go and see it and try it on again.



Now, when I originally bought the dress, I looked in the mirror and saw myself looking tall, elegant and slim. This time, I felt I looked odd and frumpy, short and swallowed by lots of tulle. I think part of this is because the dress is now too big for me, as I've slimmed down.  Looking at the photographs, I've been trying to work out why I feel dissatisfied with them, and it clicked this afternoon.

Somehow, I think I expected that the minute I put the wedding dress on, I would transform into someone bridal. Instead, I just look like me, flaws and all, except in a wedding dress and veil. In my mind, wearing the wedding dress would mean that suddenly I would look exactly like the models, I wouldn't do my stupid gurny smile and that I'd know what to do with my arms for the first time ever. That out of nowhere I'd develop the grace and poise that I've previously never displayed, and would appear elegant and put together, instead of standing awkwardly, limbs at weird angles, a fixed grin and terror in my eyes.

Hanging around on wedding forums, I came across the concept of 'dress regret', but I find myself wondering how many people suffering from it are in fact instead suffering from the same misconception as I, that simply putting on a dress would make them look exactly like the models on the designer websites.

Important things I have realised:

- When we look at the model pictures, we're looking at someone who is not only in a fitted dress, but who has also had their hair and makeup done professionally, and then been professionally lit and photographed; as opposed to me, who did my own make-up in my typically ham-handed fashion, then walked uphill in a heavy coat in the freezing cold before going into a hot shop, to have my photo taken with my phone camera that has an unnecessarily powerful flash.

- They have possibly been also photoshopped a little too.

- Upon discussion with my consultant, I discovered that the models for the designers of my dress are approximately 6'3" tall, and probably like a size 2. I am 5'6", and a size 10-12. High heels can only do so much to address that issue.

- They are models, which aside from meaning that they are built like elegant human-giraffe hybrids, they also have been trained how to stand in front of a camera and manage to look like a normal human being. And, on the off chance that they forget how to do that, there is a professional photographer with a very large camera telling them exactly how to position themselves. I am utterly incapable of working out how to position myself, and when faced with a camera my expression becomes a rictus.



It's easy to forget, when surrounded by images of all these apparently perfect women, that to get to that final image there's a lot of work put in, and usually a large team behind it. I like to think that if you snapped a quick picture of any of these models on your phone camera, they'd also look shiny and a bit chinny.


However, there's very little that can be done about my inherent lack of grace and poise. So, to finish the post, have some illustrative gifs.


Models:

Me:

Models:

Me:

Models:

Me:

My wedding photographs will be interesting to say the least.

Wedding WTF-ery

As Christmas draws nearer and the New Year looms before us, I find myself at this time of year often thinking about what has gone on over the last 12 months. What I have done, what I have learned.

What has made me sit there and go "WTF?"

Planning a wedding naturally introduces you to all sorts of weird and wonderful things, so my WTF quotient has been more than met this year. I'd like to share with you some of the delightful things I've discovered that make me a little bit sad for the world.

2013's Countdown of Wedding WTF-ery

10) Butlers in the Buff

Apparently having your food and drinks served by semi-naked or entirely naked men is a must-have Hen Party thing now. In fact, there are several companies which offer such a delectable service. Oh, but they are not just there to be looked at, oh no!

If that doesn't look like a headline from a Carry On film, I don't know what does. 

My main concerns regarding naked men in a hospitality role are very much hygiene-based (do they have to wear hairnets?), but additionally I find myself wondering if they have to specify the types of food they won't serve. I can't imagine flaming Christmas pudding or Chinese Sizzling Beef going down particularly well.

9) Custom-written wedding songs

Are you worried that your first dance song isn't personal enough, because it's written by a stranger? Well, worry no more! Now you can get a completely personal unique-to-you first dance song, and whilst it's still written by a stranger, now you can pay them for it! And because you've paid them to do it, it's super personal and special to you, even though you haven't put any more thought or effort into it whatsoever than if you had just used the song you'd played in the first place, but it cost you more, and that's all that counts! Getting someone else to do things for you is the most personal thing ever.

Alternatively, you can provide them with some lyrical suggestions of your own, because of course the only reason you haven't become an award-winning lyricist yourself already is just because of lack of interest on your part, and not at all because every time you try to write lyrics they sound totally lame. Because if it were lame, no-one would be making a song out of it right? Even if you did pay them.

8) Gyms advertising at Wedding Shows

"Excuse me, miss, we can give you a discount today if you join us to get into shape for your wedding!"

Excuse you, are you trying to say I'm not in shape already? Are you trying to say I'm not thin enough to get married the way I am?

That said, it is fun watching them try to quickly backpedal when you put them on the spot like that.

But regardless, I'm in a room full of people trying to sell me stuff on the basis that I'm a beautiful princess and I deserve the best, and thus should immediately buy whatever it is they are selling, and you're going to be the one guy who stands there and tells me I need to work out? And you expect to not come across as a total jerk? And then you want me to give you money?

Good luck with that one.


7) Sweets, sweets and more sweets
When it comes to wedding favours, diabetes seems to be the token of choice, with options ranging from sweetie trees, personalised chocolate bars and even full on candy buffets for people to gorge themselves on. Well, insulin resistance is the gift that stays with you forever.

I love sweets as much as the next girl, but when I'm sober I have the self-control of a stoned gerbil if there are sweets in front of me. When drink is involved, naturally this control drops even lower, to the point where in the middle of the night I'm eating ready-made frosting out of the tub.

This just generally seems like a really bad idea. But perhaps because I'm assuming that everyone has such terrible discipline and low sugar tolerance as me, and thus will end up both drunk and utterly hopped up on sugar.

6) The Garter Toss
Now, obviously I'd heard of the garter toss. I knew it was like the male equivalent of the bouquet toss. And whilst all the images of a dude with his head right up his wife's dress in front of everyone they know made me uncomfortable, I was like, that's cool, if they wanna do that.

But then I discovered that there is a second part of the garter toss. In that the guy who catches the garter then has to put said garter onto the leg of the poor woman who caught the bouquet.

This seems to me to be a thing you do if you have only invited people you deeply deeply dislike to your wedding and want to make them feel as awkward and uncomfortable as possible, in front of everyone they know, and then never speak to them again ever.

5) When DIY-ing to save money costs more than just getting someone else to do it.
There was someone on a wedding website who was detailing how she made her own custom letterpress invitations. When you totted up the total price, it actually cost more than just getting a professional to do it. Now, fair enough if you are DIY-ing for the love, or to make things more personal, that is a legitimate reason for doing it, and mad props to you.

But when you're explicitly doing it yourself to keep it cheap, and still manage to go over your extremely generous budget, maybe you need to reconsider your options. Like one bride who was featured in a wedding magazine, who cheerfully told everyone that she "did a lot of DIY which kept costs down," followed by the revelation that she'd 'blown' her £25,000 budget. This must be some new and exciting definition of cost-cutting which I was previously unaware of.

 4) The phrase 'Say Yes to the Dress'.
Whilst a dazzling piece of marketing, in that it has permeated just about every online corner of wedding planning, but it is irritating as all hell. And there's something bizarrely smug about such an irritatingly simplistic little rhyme, possibly because in the show it's from, it's always said over some tense swelling music to try and build a sense of excitement.

But let's be real, it's a trite phrase from a show about women with waaaay too much money, filmed in a store that is so expensive that the consultants pull faces if the budget the bride gives is under $2000, and who seem to specialise in dresses by a designer who apparently almost exclusively makes dresses with see through bodices. The brides don't even get to pick their dresses out on that show. The consultants usher them into a little room and bring them dresses based on their budget and the results of some cryptic interview. And everyone just repeats it, like buying a dress doesn't count if you don't whip out that saying. Does everything have to have a catchphrase now?

That gif makes me go WHAT.


3)  There is a significant difference between 'ivory' and 'light ivory'.
I didn't even know 'light ivory' was a colour until July. But apparently it is, and apparently it is a significantly different from plain old 'ivory' that I can't borrow my cousin's veil because people will notice.

2) No free wine at the National Wedding Show.
I paid £15 to get into this shindig, and now you're trying to convince me to hire out a photobooth that also doubles as a teeth whitener, but you want me to do it sober? The free shows I've been to give out free wine, and free cake, or nibbles! How is it that this is the biggest and most expensive one to go to, but I get a grand total of nothing to eat or drink. That is BAD MARKETING.

Seriously though, if you are trying to convince me that what I really really need at my wedding is a masseuse in each toilet to leap out at unsuspecting guests when they go for a comfort break, you may find that I'm a little more open to suggestion if I am a little more drunk. I mean, no, I'm not going to buy it, but at least this way I'll pretend to be interested.

1) You can now hire people to plan your proposal for you.
That's right, in the theme which we began earlier, we know that you don't really need to put any thought into stuff if you can pay someone else to do it for you. Why take the time and effort into thinking of a really personal way to ask what will probably be the most important question of your life, when you can pay £500 to have a stranger arrange a picnic for you. Hell, even if you just decide that you don't want anything too public or fancy, they can just make a scrap book for you, using all your personal photographs.

Awww. How terribly thoughtful with conveniently minimal effort.

I wonder what new and exciting WTFery I will come across next year.

Too Cool for the Pool

When I was a kid, more than anything else, I wanted to be a mermaid.

The mermaid scene in Peter Pan was my favourite bit about it, and I loved the film Splash, although I recall myself being oddly ambivalent towards The Little Mermaid, I think that might have been to do with my desire not to see Ariel and Prince Eric kiss, because I loved the part at the beginning, under the sea, seeing all the different mermaids swimming in for the concert.

In fact, I think to a point I was convinced I was one. This lead to countless (countless!) family photos where I was attempting to sit like a mermaid sits. By which I mean, curling my legs behind me like a fin, propping my hands on the floor in front of me and, inexplicably, tilting my head coyly to one side because obviously no mermaid can sit with her head straight.

If you had told me as a kid what could be achieved as an adult with a lot of spare cash and a monofin, I'd have dedicated my savings right away to follow in the footsteps of Mermaid Melissa. I trained myself to be able to swim 50 meters underwater in one go, I bet given enough time and incentive I could have learned to do it wearing a tail.

This obsession has sort of quieted as I've got older, but there's still a certain fascination there. For a while I thought maybe I'd get a fishtail wedding dress, but that experiment ended rather tragically when my thighs met the fitted skirts and did not mesh as well as I had hoped.


However, whilst being a mermaid could not shape my fashion choices, it has meant that my exercise regime of choice is swimming. I've done lots of swimming over the years, including a brief stint learning synchronized swimming.

The problem with swimming as a form of exercise is that you are, more so than any other exercise I can think of, at the mercy of the way other people behave for how your exercise will progress. And the more often I go swimming, the more I want to start dishing out impromptu swimming lessons to people because honestly I don't know what they think they're doing, but most of them time it's not any stroke I recognise.

So, after plenty of frustration, I've decided to vent my spleen and present to you Claire's List of Swimming Pool Dos and Don'ts (mainly don'ts).

1) Unless the pool is totally empty, don't do Butterfly.
Because no matter how well you think you can do it, you can't do it. What happens instead is that you flail around madly, splashing everyone in the vicinity and causing the pool to resemble the sea in a storm. And yes, maybe you have been able, by some flukish turn of momentum, to get from one end of the pool to the other doing what you think is Butterfly. But that doesn't mean you're doing the stroke successfully. Or even at all.
 
2) Follow the swimming direction signs.
They put those signs up at the end of the lanes for a reason. So that we don't swim into each other, and there's still room to overtake. Don't be a douchebag and swim really slowly right down the middle. There's no reason for it, and trust me, when I swim past you, I'm going to try and get a sneaky kick in.

3)  Just because you are splashing more, it doesn't mean you are swimming faster.
Hey you, doing the super splashy front crawl there. Yes, you. Do you want to know why you have to stop for a break at the end of every length? It's because you're expending unnecessary energy trying to have half the pool water in the air at any give time during your swim. If you are splashing it means your stroke is not under the water. This means you aren't getting as much force from your strokes as you'd like, because most of the energy is being used flinging water everywhere like a panicked whale. You will go faster if you don't splash, so try bringing your legs under the surface of the water. Yes, there is a lot of splashing when people swim in the Olympics, but they are swimming MUCH faster than you. At your speed, just splashing around the place isn't going to convince anyone that you're an athlete.


4) There is no need to do a racing turn in the slow lane.
Because really. You're not fooling anyone. You look like an idiot and I just nearly got your foot in my face because you're not very good at them.

5) There are steps for getting into the pool. Use them.
Save the jumping in and splashing everyone for parties, holidays and when the pool is full of kids. When it is adult, laned swimming time, you just look like a jerk when you leap into the pool.

 6) Don't spit in the pool.
 Don't spit in the pool! Why would you even think that was okay? Jeez.

7) Don't get in the pool with all your friends, then stand at the end of the lane talking and clogging it up instead of swimming.
I get it, everyone needs a break. But to need a break, it would make sense if you did some exercise first. Oh, you don't want to swim? Then go a sit in the lane that is specifically roped off for people who aren't there to exercise instead of entirely clogging up one end of the exercise lane.

8) Don't stand up and walk halfway down the length.
 Unless you have a cramp that is crippling, or have otherwise injured yourself, don't stop abruptly halfway down the side of the pool and stand up, looking gormless. I am going to swim into you if you do that.

9) If you have stood up, don't then try to turn around and go back the way you came, get out of the way.
Otherwise, see above, I will swim into you.


10) Because it bears reiterating: Don't spit in the pool.
I mean seriously, what is wrong with you?





However, if you decide that you would rather not follow these rules to make swimming happy and pleasant for everyone,  I will accept a donation in the shape of my own private swimming pool. Kthnxbye.