Wedding hair and makeup in Geelong and on the Bellarine
A Melbourne makeup artist who drives down to you for the morning, with hair booked in alongside. Geelong and Newtown, out across the Bellarine through Drysdale, Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads and Queenscliff, and along the Surf Coast to Torquay and Anglesea.
Geelong bookings start from three or four services. That is what most bookings here look like, and it is the freeway rather than the day that sets it. If you are one person and want me there, say so when you write: the figure is then built around the time the trip takes, not ruled out. Four is nothing unusual: a bride with three of her people, or a pair who each want hair as well as makeup, and it grows from there. If you are on your own and coming into the city anyway, the Middle Park studio takes single bookings at studio prices.
Everything travels with me: the full kit and a proper chair. The corner you hand me becomes a workable station, whether it is a house in Newtown or a suite over the water.
Bridal makeup and wedding hair styling
Three kinds of wedding down here, and what each one asks for
Geelong is not one setting. Within forty minutes of each other there are three quite different days, and the makeup is built for whichever one you have booked.
- Vineyards on the Bellarine. Jack Rabbit, Terindah Estate, Leura Park, Oakdene, Basils Farm and their neighbours look down over the bay from lawns and terraces with no shade worth the name. Hours in the open, a breeze off the water by mid afternoon, and a gap to fill outdoors between the vows and the meal.
- The ocean end. Barwon Heads, Ocean Grove, Point Lonsdale, Queenscliff, and further round at Torquay and Jan Juc. Salt in the air, sand underfoot, and a hard white bounce off the sea that flattens everything it touches. Every pin goes in expecting it, and the finish is built for what the camera gives back rather than for how it reads in the room.
- The waterfront and town. Along the Geelong front and up through Newtown the evening runs long and ends indoors, under soft warm lamps with the floor full once the meal is cleared. Weather is not the enemy there, time is, and the answer to time is laid down in the morning.
Not seeing your venue here means nothing, ask regardless. The weather around Geelong repeats itself far more reliably than the guest lists do. Getting married across the water instead? The Mornington Peninsula page sets out how that morning is run, and mobile bookings around Melbourne follow the same rules.
Salt, glare and an afternoon that does not let up
Weddings down here sit on water, and the light behaves differently for it. Corio Bay throws it straight back up into a face, the ocean beaches add sand and glare on top of that, and a camera reads all of it before it reads anything I have done. Put an afternoon of wind on top, which on the Bellarine is not an occasional event, and you have the two conditions that undo makeup designed for a room.
So the base goes on differently for a ceremony held outside. Sun protection is built into two layers: the primer underneath is a high factor one, and the foundation on top brings SPF of its own. By the middle of the day, skin that has sat in open sun no longer holds pigment the way it did at breakfast, so this is decided before the first brush touches it.
The roughest thing this finish has ever survived happened on a photo shoot. The models went in the water and climbed back out with the work still on their faces. An exposed headland in October is a gentler proposition.
A trial is booked on its own at $230, and for a coastal wedding it is worth more than it usually is: an hour spent testing a look against wind and glare, with room left to change your mind, beats meeting the problem at seven in the morning with everyone waiting.
Getting a whole party ready by the hour on the invitation
Most of the morning belongs to everyone except the bride. Guest makeup runs from $170 each, with hair charged on its own, so four or five people getting ready together reads as routine down here. Give me the names and what everyone wants, and the whole morning gets booked in one go instead of five people each wrestling with it separately.
The start time is arithmetic rather than a guess: tell me the hour everyone needs to be finished by and how many are being done, and it falls out of those two. Leaving at four to be at work by five is ordinary for a Geelong ceremony, and I plan the drive around that rather than around convenience. Big groups get an assistant at no extra charge. With that much driving already in the day, the schedule has no slack in it, and two of us working is what keeps it.
Hair and makeup come from the same pair of hands, and at this distance that is logistics rather than taste. Nobody else is making the drive, so the two are designed as one job: if the hair is going up, the skin and the eyes are planned already knowing it. Hair is charged by length, and the hair styling page lists it. The bridal page walks through what happens between the trial and the wedding morning.
The drive, and what it adds to the quote
Travel is $1 a kilometre on the road. The trip happens in both directions, which puts the real rate at $2 for each kilometre of distance between us. For Geelong and Newtown that lands around $150. Further out, through Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads, Queenscliff and Torquay, it runs closer to $200.
Whatever the number is, you have it in writing before you book, and it does not move afterwards, whatever the freeway did that morning. What each service costs sits on the pricing page, quoted separately from travel.
Book a Geelong wedding
Send me the date, the venue or the address I am driving to, and how many people need doing. You get a start time and the travel figure back before anything is locked in.
Online booking is for the studio in Middle Park. For a mobile booking, send an enquiry instead: travel time is planned by hand, and the start time and travel fee are confirmed first.