When a bride writes to me, her first question is almost always the same: “What makeup would you recommend?”
My answer nearly always surprises her, because I don't talk about colours. I talk about her skin.
The most beautiful makeup in the world, applied to unprepared skin, lasts only a few hours. It dries out over dehydrated areas, slides off oily ones, settles into fine expression lines. No foundation, however expensive, can fix a base that was never built.
That's why I always say my work begins before the makeup.
What preparing the skin really means
Preparing the skin doesn't mean applying more products. It means applying the right ones for that skin, at that moment, in that season.
Combination skin in a Sardinian summer doesn't have the same needs as the same skin in March. Skin that has caught the sun in the previous days behaves differently. Skin stressed by weeks of preparations — and skin always feels stress — reacts in its own way.
That's why the trial isn't only about choosing a look. It's how I read the skin: where it holds moisture and where it loses it, where product stays and where it slips away.
The weeks before: the bride's own work
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, the work isn't mine — it's hers. And the most important advice I can give is also the least spectacular.
Don't change everything at the last minute.
I often see brides who, two weeks before the wedding, start new treatments, products they've never tried, intensive protocols someone recommended. It's the fastest way to arrive on the wedding day with reactive, unpredictable skin.
What works is the opposite: consistency, well in advance. Regular hydration practised for months is worth more than any shock treatment done the week before. If you want a professional treatment — a facial, for example — schedule it with at least three or four weeks' margin, never close to the date.
And sun protection. In Sardinia, between May and September, this isn't generic advice: it's the difference between even skin and skin that on the wedding day shows tan lines, redness or discolouration the makeup will have to cover instead of enhance.
The morning of the wedding: where everything is decided
On the day I arrive with a clear idea, but the first thing I do is look at the skin. Because the skin of that morning is never exactly the skin of the trial: there's the emotion, perhaps a short night, the heat.
The principle I follow is layer light. Thin layers of product, each left to settle before the next, build a base that lasts far better than a single heavy coat. It's slower, and that's exactly why it works.
A meaningful part of the time goes into something invisible: waiting. Letting hydration truly absorb before moving on. Those in a hurry skip this step, and it shows four hours later.
The Sardinia factor
Doing makeup in Sardinia in summer is a different craft from doing it anywhere else, and everyone who works here knows it.
There's the heat, which melts products that are too rich. There's the sea humidity near the coast. There's the wind, which carries salt even several hundred metres from the sea. And there's the light: that low, golden late-afternoon light, beautiful to photograph and merciless with any flaw in the base.
A wedding on the Costa Smeralda runs from the afternoon ceremony until deep into the night. The makeup has to carry through all of it: the emotion of the ceremony, the photos at sunset, dinner outdoors, the dancing. There's no miracle product that holds on its own. The base holds, if it was built well.
What I don't do
I don't transform. For me this isn't a slogan.
I learned to do makeup from a personal experience: when I was planning my own wedding, I couldn't find a makeup artist who represented me. All I found were heavy, covering looks that turned every woman into an unrecognisable version of herself.
Well-prepared skin shows through the makeup. It keeps its texture, its natural light, its features. Makeup enhances it, doesn't replace it. It's the exact opposite of a mask — and it takes far more work, because there's nothing to hide behind.
Once the skin is ready, the next step is choosing a look that's truly yours: I write about it in how to choose your bridal makeup look.