Wedding hair and makeup in the Yarra Valley
Hair and makeup for the whole wedding party, brought to the estate you are staying at. Yarra Glen, Coldstream and Yering, through Lilydale, Wandin and Dixons Creek to Healesville, and out as far as Seville and Warburton.
Valley weddings have one thing city weddings almost never have: by the night before, everyone is already there. The bride, her mother, the bridesmaids, half the guest list, all booked into cottages and lodges within walking distance of the vines. Which means the getting ready is not scattered across four suburbs, it happens in one room, and I plan the whole morning of hair and makeup as a single sitting rather than a route.
Three or four services is the minimum out here. That is what most bookings look like out here, and it comes from the distance rather than the day. A single booking is not out of the question either. It carries a price of its own, worked out from the time the day takes. Tell me who is being done and what each of them wants, and the whole thing gets set up in one go.
A wedding at Stones of the Yarra Valley
One house, one morning, everybody in it
Doing the hair and makeup in one room changes the shape of the day for the better. Nobody drives anywhere half finished, nobody waits on somebody who is stuck in traffic, and the order can be shuffled on the spot when the photographer wants the bride early. I set up once and stay put until the last person is done.
Guest makeup begins at $170 a head, hair is quoted apart from it, and a bridal party of four or five is the usual shape of a booking out here. On the bigger mornings an assistant comes with me, at no cost to you. The point is that everyone is ready at the same time, because the photographer is booked from a particular hour and will not wait. There is no surcharge for that.
Hair and makeup come in one booking, which matters more at distance than it does in town. There is no separately booked artist driving out to meet us, so the updo and the makeup are decided together, in one conversation, and neither is squeezed to make room for the other. The hair styling page sets out what hair costs by length, and the bridal page covers the trial and everything that follows it.
Cold at seven, hot by two: what the valley does to a face
Inland is not the same problem as the coast. There is no sea breeze taking the edge off the afternoon, and the gap between first light and mid afternoon is wide enough to matter:
- A cold start. Valley mornings sit several degrees under the city, and in winter there is frost on the lawn at seven. Cold skin takes product differently from warm skin, so the first makeup of the day and the last one are not worked the same way.
- Dry heat by early afternoon. Summer up here runs hot without the humidity, and hot and dry is what breaks a base that was matched at breakfast. Sun protection goes in at the primer and again in the foundation, so it is part of the base.
- Light off open lawn and gravel. Estate ceremonies happen on cut grass with the sun straight overhead and pale stone underfoot throwing it back up. That is unflattering light by default, so the makeup is made to survive it in photographs rather than to look right in a room.
A hair and makeup trial costs $230 and is booked by itself. It is worth doing for a valley wedding specifically because these are conditions you cannot judge from a mirror in a bathroom: better to see how a look holds through a warm afternoon while there is still time to adjust it.
Wineries, gardens and the long way between them
The wedding photographs above are from a day I worked at Stones of the Yarra Valley, on St Huberts Road in Coldstream. The bride is in the barn there at dinner in the third frame, hours after the makeup went on that morning.
Most of what happens out here happens at an estate like it. Zonzo, Tarrawarra, Yering Station, Coombe, Rochford, Riverstone, Levantine Hill, Oakridge and their neighbours all run the same way: a ceremony on grass or under trees, drinks outside while the light goes gold, and dinner in a barn or a glasshouse afterwards.
The part people underestimate is the walking. Between the cottage, the ceremony site, the vines where the photographs happen and the room where dinner is served, a valley wedding covers real ground, often on grass and gravel and often in heat. Hair is pinned for that rather than for standing still, and any hair that would not survive a hundred metres of paddock does not get pinned that way.
Not every wedding here is at a winery, and the ones in private gardens and family properties around Healesville and Dixons Creek are some of the nicest mornings I do. Ask whatever your venue is. If the date turns out to be somewhere else entirely, Geelong and the Bellarine and the Mornington Peninsula have pages of their own, and mobile work around Melbourne runs on the same terms.
What the drive adds, and when I set off
Travel is charged at $1 for each kilometre driven, and since the car makes the trip twice that comes to $2 per kilometre of the distance between us. Coldstream, Yering and Yarra Glen land around $110. Healesville and Dixons Creek sit nearer $140, and Warburton further again. You get the figure in writing before the booking is confirmed and it does not change afterwards.
Four in the morning is a departure time I use when the day calls for it, so that everything is finished on time rather than finished in a hurry. Start from the hour the last person has to be finished, count the faces, and the time I knock on the door is settled by those two numbers. Service prices are listed on the pricing page; travel is quoted as its own line and never folded into them.
Book a Yarra Valley wedding
Tell me the date, which estate or address I am coming to, and how many people are being done. The start time and the travel figure come back to you before anything is confirmed.
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.