愛-Vey! Our Chewish Welcome Dinner

愛-vey indeed. We've reached the point in our relationship about which I've long been anxious. This is the part where I recap our wedding, which thereby necessitates my putting up a lot of pictures of myself, which leads to my feeling like one of those parents who keeps spamming their friends with an endless stream of photos of their baby. Baby smiling. Baby drooling. Baby pooping. You get the idea.

Of course, there's no way around it. So I promise you this: funny captions will be added, embarrassing expressions will be uncensored, and much hilarity will ensue. That's right. It's going to be a stream of hilarity. Mrs. HC smiling. Mrs. HC drooling. Mrs. HC . . . uh, nevermind.

Let's just start, shall we?

Our Chewish wedding weekend did not start out on a particularly promising note. In fact, it barely started at all, since I spent the first two hours of it stuck in bumper-to-bumper, slow-as-molasses LA traffic.

Having pulled too many all-nighters wrestling with evil last-minute wedding projects, I needed some serious beautification. Our family friend Lynn, a ridiculously talented facialist, owns a salon, and as part of her wedding gift to me offered to do my makeup for the our welcome dinner if we came down to her lovely salon, Salon Relini, in Downey. "Sure," I thought. "I'll come at noon, and I'll be able to get from the San Fernando Valley to Downey to Marina del Rey well before the Friday afternoon traffic starts."

Right. In LA, there's no such thing as "Friday afternoon traffic." There's just traffic. At all hours of the day. For no apparent reason. I could have crawled to Downey and gotten there faster than I did driving.

Somehow I managed to survive my road rage and get to Relini. By the time I arrived, Hot Mama Cocoa and Hottest Sister Cocoa had both already gotten hottified. Lynn uses only Bare Minerals products (which is what I use every day), and she managed to make my already beautiful sister and mom look Stunning (capital S). There's some theory floating around the interwebs that you can't get good photos using mineral makeup; as you can see in this unretouched photo, that's just crazy talk.

Other products that Lynn recommends for brides are Yonka's Huile Corps -- a sexy, light oil that left my skin so soft and luminous that people kept touching me all night (at least I think that's why they were touching me . . .) -- and Bare Escentual's Faux Tan -- an instant self-tanner that looks really natural and doesn't rub off on clothes. I ended up getting some false lashes applied, but if I hadn't, I would have gone with Lynn's (and my) favorite mascara, Blinc's Kiss Me Mascara. Blinc mascara "tubes" your lashes, so you don't have to worry about mascara smudge or raccoon eyes.

I don't have a fresh-from-the-makeup-chair photo of Lynn's work, but here's a photo of me and an oddly petrified looking Mr. HC right before our guests arrived at the welcome dinner. That's the Yonka body oil effect on my shoulder; I mixed a few drops of the oil with my favorite scented body lotion (Trish McEvoy's Blackberry & Vanilla). Admit it, you want to touch my shoulder. Go ahead, touch it. Doesn't it feel smooth and shiny . . . like a computer screen?

Eventually, we made our way back from Downey back to Santa Monica, the location of our welcome dinner. As you can preview from this photo, the event was outrageously fun (either that or cousin-in-laws Dayle and Laurel just said to me, "Hands up, or we'll shoot!").

See? I told you there'd be hilarity.

What's so funny? Well, you'll have to wait for the next post.

What are your go-to makeup products for special occasions? And will you be using the same makeup you use every day on your wedding day? Or trying something new?