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Dermaplaning, microneedling, chemical peels and lasers. A steady cadence of Botox, photofacials and blood drawn from your arm and injected back into your face for good measure. This is the dizzying, high-stakes new world of bridal beauty, where preparing your face and body for your big day is a marathon, not a sprint, and the ultimate prize is to look effortlessly beautiful.
Take Julia Fomenko, for example, who got engaged last July and immediately began planning. Not just her wedding, but her skin care regimen.
The 27-year-old from Scottsdale didn't simply want to look good on her big day; she wanted to "glow," that elusive quality that every beauty obsessive seems to be chasing. After a bad bout of acne a few years ago, Fomenko told Yahoo she's felt hyper-conscious of her skin, and she knew that having it look as good as it could be was a priority for her big day.
So far, she's done laser treatments and microneedling. She dissolved years of lip filler to get back to a more natural look and is planning on her twice-yearly Botox a few months out. She's done facials and red light saunas, eaten organic meat and taken supplements and plans to keep up her routine until her wedding in November.
"Anything for the white dress," she captioned an Instagram Reel, showing her in various masks, getting injected, working out and more. "Wedding prep is not for the weak."
In the past, it may have been enough for brides to start a new workout routine in the months leading up to their wedding, hire a great makeup artist and hope to be transformed. Today, the ultimate bridal flex is to be so glowy from a mix of treatments, lasers and supplement stacks that you barely need makeup at all. And amid a booming medical aesthetics industry, there's never been more ways to achieve that perfection if you're willing to shoulder the cost. It's not simply an investment of time and mental energy, either: the Gen Z brides I spoke to are spending thousands of dollars, if not north of $10,000, to look ethereal on a day where there's enormous pressure to seem flawless.
What it takes to get that "glow"
Not every bridal glow-up is extensive: it can be as inexpensive and relatively simple as drinking a mixture of lemon and olive oil in the mornings (said to reduce inflammation and leave your face looking "more contoured," claims that Vogue called "loose"). Every 2026 and 2027 bride seems to be doing Gabby George's "bridal arms" series — a workout program intended to make you look toned in a strapless gown — and getting in 10,000 steps a day.
Or, they're taking it even further. By far the biggest component of a modern bridal glow-up is skin care. In an era where wellness is a religion, Hailey Bieber's "glass skin" is coveted and perhaps most importantly, every moment of your wedding weekend will be documented on high-definition iPhones, having an unblemished, flawless face is more than a confidence boost. It signifies the quiet luxury of discipline and telegraphs to the world that you've reached your physical peak.
Paige Berkey Shull, 29, married her husband in Positano, Italy, last fall, and said she spent her year-and-a-half engagement prepping to have the best skin of her life. After struggling for years with rosacea and acne, she knew she wanted to have a plan to make sure she felt her most confident.
"My goal really was to get my skin as glowy and smooth as possible, because I wanted to wear pretty minimal makeup and just have my skin look its best," she told Yahoo. "So, during the engagement process, I was on a timeline. I mapped out a plan that I was going to follow to get my skin ready and prepped for the big day. That came with a lot of skin treatments."
Shull had an advantage, though, in that she works in the medical aesthetics industry as a nurse practitioner in Atlanta. Armed with the knowledge she had from her job, she mapped out a cohesive plan, which included, in part, microneedling with exosomes ($700), a chemical peel ($350), three Broadband light photofacials ($450 each), multiple rounds of full-face Botox ($1,300), a DiamondGlow facial with dermaplaning ($315) and a daily medical-grade skin care routine consisting of serums, retinols and cleansers (approximately $1,000 every four months). If that sounds unintelligible to you, it means you're probably not a 20-something woman on TikTok.
When Shull added up all of her treatments in the year before her wedding, she found they totaled more than $16,000 (though she paid much less thanks to her career connections). And it's her insider knowledge, she said, that helped her understand how to get the result she wanted.
"All of these treatments kind of go hand in hand," she said. "The best results come from using all of the tools in the toolbox. I feel like it's maybe not so much one specific thing, but just a little bit of everything that gives the wow result."
In the name of radical transparency
The pressure on brides to transform their bodies and skin is not unique to 2026 — women have been "shedding for the wedding" for decades — but modern social media is all-consuming. Watch just one wedding-related TikTok and your feed will soon be inundated with dewy, beautiful women who are documenting their journeys to get even more perfect. Many brides on social media admit they started their prep because, simply, everyone else was doing it.
Under hashtags like "bridal prep" and "bridal glow-up," women share their months or even years-long plans for their big day. This sort of transparency is typical for influencers and normies alike, who can generate months of content from sharing their journeys.
When Chloe Holladay, an influencer best known for her time as a majorette at the University of Alabama, got engaged in July 2024, she knew she'd want to document her bridal prep for her more than 1 million followers on TikTok and Instagram. So, she launched what she called her "glow-up series" about six months before her wedding, documenting her skin care and workout routines. "A big thing for me was being fit," she told Yahoo. "I really wanted to feel and look my best. I was working out every single day."
As a former college and now NFL majorette, Holladay is no stranger to getting glam. But the 24-year-old stepped up her wedding prep, trying new treatments like dermaplaning and lasers to achieve the most natural look possible.
"I was very scared, because your face peels for a week, a week and a half," she said of her laser treatment. "It takes a layer off of the top, and it rejuvenates your face. I love it so much. Obviously, you need to do that like months prior to your wedding, because you don't want your face peeling. It feels like sandpaper."
On TikTok, many women show off their peeling, swollen or reddened faces after treatments as a badge of honor. Most said they felt that a little pain and discomfort was worth it for the desired effect.
Jackson Lumsden, a 26-year-old content creator from Greenville, South Carolina, also began documenting her wedding prep after seeing similar posts online and wanting to share with her 10,000 followers. "I really just wanted to see what worked, what was worth the money, and honestly be very transparent about it," she said, noting that she was able to get many treatments complimentary in exchange for a genuine review.
Besides the facials, Lumsden's favorite thing she did was dermaplaning, a non-invasive procedure that uses a small scalpel to scrape away peach fuzz and dead skin. The most extreme thing she tried was PRF (Platelet-Rich Fibrin) therapy, which takes your own blood and injects it back into your face (the treatments run about $750 for each, and three are recommended). She didn't know what to expect — but she ended up loving it.
"It is basically cheek filler that fades over time," she said. "It was super natural. It just plumps your cheeks a little bit, and in a really natural way. I loved it."
The glow-up blowback
But as bridal beauty regimens become increasingly intense, anti-glow-up content is also trending. On this corner of TikTok, brides describe the pressure to stick to a multi-pronged schedule as stressful and unnecessary.
"Sometimes it feels less like you're getting married and more like you're preparing for a red carpet premiere," observed 2026 bride Lauren Schmal. "Somewhere along the way, weddings stopped being just about celebrating a relationship and started becoming a performance. There's this expectation that you should arrive at your wedding looking like the most optimized version of yourself, as if engagement comes with a checklist of physical upgrades."
Schmal, a 25-year-old from Chicago, is marrying her high school sweetheart next month and said she immediately felt the pull to begin a new beauty routine as soon as she got engaged. She noted that a lot of the content tends to be presented as "self-care" or "wellness." "Before you know it, you're wondering if you need ten appointments you never considered before getting engaged," she told Yahoo.
Gen Z brides find themselves constantly navigating this peculiar tension. On one hand, young women are subjected to an extremely specific beauty standard that's beamed to them every hour of every day through their algorithms. On the other hand, recent trends like "bare nails" and "glowdowns" seem to suggest that there's a certain fatigue with what these intensive routines demand of you.
It's certainly easy to get sucked in. I got married a decade ago, and while I certainly stressed about my skin and hair and added extra workouts, getting Botox or peels never even crossed my mind. Ironically, my generation of brides also had elaborate beauty routines, but ones that focused on covering up our flaws: it was the era of Kim Kardashian-esque contouring and "full face beats." By contrast, today's brides are encouraged to let their natural beauty shine through — but are told that it might require months of appointments, procedures and of course, a few thousand dollars to make it happen.
Eunice Louis-Jacques, a nurse and aesthetic field manager at SEV Laser in Atlanta, told Yahoo that her best advice for brides who are intent on making changes before their wedding day is to be careful and methodical. She often sees women who try treatments too close to their big day, which can be hard on their skin.
"It's not like getting your nails done or your hair done," she said. "These types of treatments are treatments that you would like to start a good six months out at minimum, because consistency is key. Building up a routine is really going to give you the results you're looking for, because when it comes to the body, the skin is one of the slowest-healing organs. You want to start early."
Shull, who now creates custom plans for her engaged clients, said she understands that the number of treatments can feel intimidating, but that she achieved her ultimate goal. "Skin care is my favorite form of self-care. It was really fun for me to go through the process," she said.
All four of the brides I spoke with told me they were enormously pleased with their results and had no regrets about the effort and expense involved. They all noted that they chose to embark on a bridal regimen not because they felt a desperate pressure to change themselves, but because it helped them feel confident on an already nerve-racking day. Holladay said she felt she glowed on her wedding day, but attributed it as much to her happiness as anything else. "I felt the best I could have felt ever," she said. "There's something about that bridal glow. It's that happiness, knowing it's your wedding day. I think that has a big thing to do as well, but all those treatments and things that I did leading up to the wedding really helped me feel and look my best."
Lumsden agrees that she wasn't looking to transform with her plan, but to enhance. And post-wedding, she's found it's taught her to take time to prioritize herself and relish the rituals she enjoys. "Not that I didn't value it before, but now I value taking time to decompress and noting how it made me feel afterward," she said. "Even if it's an extra 10 minutes doing my skin care."
I've realized that comparison is endless because the internet has removed the finish line. There will always be one more treatment, one more trend, one more thing you're told you need before you're ready. Lauren Schmal
Schmal's regimen is much simpler — lifting weights, not restricting what she eats or drinks and most importantly, focusing on activities that bring her joy. Though she said she has no judgment on those who choose a more intensive course, for her, the cost to her mental health would be too much.
"I didn't want to begin this next chapter chasing a temporary internet beauty standard," she said. "I've realized that comparison is endless because the internet has removed the finish line. There will always be one more treatment, one more trend, one more thing you're told you need before you're ready. At some point, you have to decide that you're already worthy of being celebrated."
"The most beautiful people at weddings aren't the ones with the smoothest skin or the whitest teeth," she added. "They're the ones who are fully present."
Shull said that no matter how much you prep, crazy things can still happen. Though she noted she felt "amazing" on her wedding day, she did have one little skin hiccup. A few days before, she got a huge bug bite in the middle of her forehead that swelled to a goose egg. It was both hilarious and made her freak out a bit, but what can you do?
"You can sit here and plan out a freaking year and a half in advance," she said, laughing, "and do all the skin prep, and then that shit will happen, you know?"
This story is part of the The New Rules of I Do, Yahoo's exploration of how Gen Z is rewriting weddings — the traditions they're keeping, the customs they're smashing and what everyone needs to know before they RSVP.
