Lana Turner had it right

... when she said, "I would rather lose a good earring than be caught without make-up."  

Image via Classic Movies Digest

I'm in make-up limbo.  I have a good amount of experience with make-up application, stemming from my reliance on it through high school and college.  As a result, I think my make-up skills are good, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they're great or wedding-worthy.  At the same time, Johnstown isn't exactly swimming with professional make-up artists.  I want to look as amazing as possible (duh), but this is a problem with no clear solution.  After some thought, I've come up with three possible options to address this make-up limbo dilemma.

Option A -- Get a professional to do the job -- a relatively easy solution, minus the fact that I would likely have to pay for a trial, pay for the actual wedding day job, and hoof it 25 minutes out to the department store to get it done on the morning of the wedding day (we don't have a Sephora or anything like that in Johnstown).  I've only had my make-up done in-store once, for my senior prom:

Personal Photo of the Snow Cones, 2006

I liked it well enough for the day, but overall, I wasn't totally impressed that the end result was infinitely better than what I could have done on my own.  I'm kind of hesitant to go down that road for the wedding for that reason.


Option B -- Go to a make-up store here in Pittsburgh and ask for step-by-step education on formal make-up.  Ideally, I'd let the make-up artist do her thing and watch closely in the hopes that I could re-create it myself.  This would hopefully save on some money, even though I'd end up buying a good number of the products used by the artist to ensure as close of a match as possible.  Makes me a little nervous, though, that the final product would be entirely in my hands.


Option C -- Suck it up and do it myself.  I'd probably go through a good number of trials on my own, experimenting with colors, contours, and all that stuff.  I figure that in today's day and age, I can surely find some sweet YouTube tutorials to help me bump my skills from average to passable for wedding day makeup.  I did my own makeup for our engagement pictures:

Photo by Christina Garber

... and I was pleased enough with the outcome.  With that being said, those were engagement pictures, which are supposed to look natural, casual, like an every-day version of yourself (at least that's my opinion).  Weddings on the other hand, are when you're supposed to look like the most beautiful, glammed up version of yourself that you can, without looking like a drag queen, that is.  I also did my own make-up for my senior commencement ball, which I consider to be the apex of my glam make-up skills:

Personal Photo with the lovely BM E and BM B.

Now all I need to do is pick a plan of attack and make it all happen, I suppose.  No biggie.

Did you have a make-up conundrum?  How did you end up sorting it all out?