I got engaged last summer. Immediately, I started imagining how I would look at my wedding. The woman who appeared in my mind had different hair, different teeth and a completely different body than me. “I will transform my arms by the time of my wedding,” I kept thinking, though I did not take any action to transform my arms. It was inconceivable that I would show up to my wedding looking like myself.

Each social media app fed me wedding prep recommendations, including dieting (rebranded as “eating clean”), working out five times a week, regular laser treatments and facials, red light therapy, lymphatic drainage massage, teeth whitening, Russian manicures, eyelash extensions and multi-step hair routines. I saw an essay by a woman who wrote about spending $30,000 on her physical appearance. “In the lead-up to my wedding I treated my body like a design project and gave myself full [rein] to indulge in every and anything I had ever remotely considered,” she explained.

That number sounds extreme, but I can see how she got there. When I called my local med spa in San Francisco to get a quote for skin treatments I had heard about in bridal forums, the receptionist told me that a single session of BroadBand Light laser would be $550, plus $1,200 for microneedling. “Those are typically done in a series,” she said; the salon sold laser treatments in packs of three and five.

Like many people – including, increasingly, men – I treat my appearance like a hobby, the way a car fanatic might daydream about ways to improve their Porsche. But when it comes to adding thousands of dollars of treatments on top of my already-extensive hair care and skincare routine for my wedding, I have to ask: who would all of this be for? Presumably, every attendee likes me, regardless of my skin luminosity or upper arm circumference. So what plus one or random social media follower am I trying to impress?

It would be nice to look dazzlingly beautiful at my wedding, but I just don’t know if I can be bothered to find a $699 infrared sauna blanket or cut out gluten. I think it might be more freeing to look … mid. Mid, and happy. It’s not that I’m deeply principled. It’s just that conforming to 2026 bridal beauty standards is such an endless task that it might actually be easier to accept myself as I am.

I sought out women who are also negotiating ways to show up at their wedding looking like themselves.

Jackie Wegner, 29, told me that as she prepared for her Cape Cod wedding last summer, well-wishers inquired about her new beauty routine. Did she plan, one friend asked, to go on a GLP-1 weight-loss drug?

Wegner, who has dealt with an eating disorder, was confused.

“My husband chose to marry me,” she reasoned. “Nobody was coming to my wedding because they wanted to see if I had lost weight or done something different with myself.” Ahead of her wedding, she maintained her regular beauty routine, and didn’t try to lose weight.

“Why would I need to change?” she said.

Natalie Craig, 34, has tried to curate a social and digital life that decenters thinness. But as soon as she got engaged, her feeds served up videos of women making comments like: “When I walk down the aisle I want to be so thin that you don’t even see me.” She shopped at bridal boutiques that serve plus-sized clients, which she thought would be more inclusive, but still ended up with an attendant who said, as she was naked: “This is going to suck you right up!”

The rise of weight-loss drugs, she said, has made this rhetoric harder to avoid.

“Thirty years from now, will [I] be looking at [my] wedding pictures and being like: ‘I should have lost five pounds?’” she wondered. “Maybe! But that’s so miserable. I just want to be exempt from that experience.”

Weddings have long been fraught with pressure on women to stretch, pilates-style, towards the apex of conventional beauty standards. The seeming omnipresence of weight-loss drugs, plastic surgery and injectables have only pushed that apex higher. Julia van der Hoeven, 32, told me she swiped through TikTok looking for planning inspiration before her December wedding at an estate outside Melbourne, Australia. Instead, she found “brides live-vlogging their injections into their faces”, she said. “You feel like you have to do it, too.”

That feeling is not unusual. A survey from the wedding planning site Zola found that nearly 80% of couples felt “pressure to change their appearance” ahead of their wedding day, and that couples spent an average of $1,100 on beauty and wellness preparations. “Advertisers have far more access to people these days,” says Helen Grace, a writer and critic of what she calls “the insecurity industry” – that is, the profit machine based on messaging that women’s bodies are flawed. That industry, she says, “is really able to – from the moment people wake up to the moment they go to sleep – make women feel worried or insecure about their wedding day”.

The endless “journey towards the imagined self” makes beauty not just a social standard but an “ethical ideal”, philosopher Heather Widdows argues in the 2018 book Perfect Me. Thus, “appearance becomes a proxy for, and intimation of, character and value”, she writes. A person with clear skin and shiny hair beneath her veil, for example, may telegraph to friends, family, followers and herself that she is more worthy of being chosen and celebrated.

‘I don’t owe anyone anything on my wedding day’

Molly Scullion, 30, got married in 2024 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in a refurbished cigar factory. “My initial reaction, once we set our date, was: ‘OK, I have X amount of months to make it to this weight,’” she said. She decided to put the thought out of her mind. But soon, guilt crept in. “Am I not doing enough?” she wondered. “Should I be changing myself?”

Pre-wedding, Scullion took some time away from social media “to really think about what makes me feel as beautiful as I can be”. Her guilt abruptly disappeared. “I don’t owe anyone anything except for myself on my wedding day,” she decided. She got facials and a spray tan, but decided not to worry about her body shape and size.

On the day, she didn’t worry about how her body looked at all. “I ultimately was so happy that I had decided to let go of any expectations of what my body was going to look like on my day so that I could just be present.”

The pressure to “look the most beautiful you’ve ever looked” at your wedding, said Scullion, also arises partly from the expense of the day. Once you spend on a dress, on makeup and hair, on a photographer, “all of that pressure – ‘it has to pay off, it has to look perfect’ – I think it really weighs on people”, she said.

“You spend money on professional photography and videography that you’ll hopefully show your children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces and say: ‘Look how beautiful mum was on her wedding day,’” said Van der Hoeven. Ahead of her wedding, she went to a dermatologist to get Botox and filler. Her injector also advised her to get a chemical peel, claiming that this would allow for a smoother makeup application on the wedding day.

“It was a disaster,” said Van der Hoeven, laughing. “It made me break out three weeks before the wedding, so I was beside myself.”

She didn’t regret any of her treatments, except the chemical peel. “I don’t know if I looked as good as I was expecting,” she said. “Maybe I built up my expectations a little bit too high as a result of getting so much done to my face.”

It isn’t reasonable, Widdows argues in her book, to expect people to shrug off the beauty standard. “Simply telling individuals to reject it is unfair and unrealistic” for a number of reasons, she writes. Failing to uphold beauty standards comes with a cost, both from external forces (say, a wedding guest calls you “brave” for showing your arms) and internally (you risk spending your wedding day worrying about your arms).

“I think anyone should be able to do anything they want with their body, but I just wish we were all so much nicer to ourselves and less critical of ourselves on a day that’s meant to be about celebrating the love you found,” said Craig, who is getting married this September. “I think we diminish it all by trying to turn ourselves into something different.”

Wegner, who was married at an inn off the cliffs of Nantucket, landed in the same place after dodging those early questions about GLP-1s and TikToks about arm liposuction.

“I look back on pictures and I’m smiling and I look like me,” she said. “I felt so beautiful. I felt like myself.”