I met the bride on the morning of her wedding. There had been no trial beforehand, which sometimes happens with a destination wedding, when the distance makes it hard to fit one into the calendar. Even so, that morning began with a rare kind of clarity.
The couple had come from Britain to marry on the Costa del Sol, surrounded by their friends and family. The booking came to me through Sunshine Weddings Spain, who planned the wedding at Cortijo Pedro Jiménez in Casares: a cortijo, the traditional Andalusian farmhouse, set on a hilltop in open countryside, with the coast on the horizon and a rural Andalusian character that makes the estate quite spectacular.
She arrived knowing exactly what she wanted: a clean, polished look with a silky finish, a shine that was soft and controlled, and not a single hair out of place. When a bride knows her look that precisely, missing the trial matters far less, because the morning is no longer spent searching for a hairstyle, only refining one.
Her character did the rest. She was sweet and warm, and the morning with her bridesmaids, whose hair I also did, had a spontaneity and an energy that made everything flow without effort.
Once her wedding hair was finished, I stayed to help her into her dress. She wanted her family to see her for the first time as a bride, with no one catching a glimpse of her until she was ready.
So I was with her through the whole transformation, from the bridal party that morning with her bridesmaids to the moment when, already in her Enzoani gown, I placed her veil and she stepped out as a bride.
The ceremony took place in the cortijo's garden, among white flowers by Deseos Florist, with the sea in the distance. A hairstyle this sleek competes with nothing: it lets the lace of the gown and the fall of the veil speak for themselves, and in the May sunshine the silky finish showed exactly the shine she had asked for, luminous and never overdone.
The celebration carried on after the ceremony, and so did her sleek wedding updo: in every photograph, from the kiss in the garden to the toast by the champagne tower, it keeps the same clean line and the same controlled shine it had when she left her room that morning.
