I related to Autumn Whitefield-Madrano’s post on failure and beauty a couple of weeks back on all manner of levels.

There was her failure of her first driving test (Autumn at 16, me at 18), which both of us had assumed that as “smart, level-headed, ‘good’” girls, it couldn’t be that hard to pass. (Turns out were wrong.) There was the idea – which I’ll write about later this week – that success should spring from natural ability rather than from effort, or that success that derives from the former is more valuable than that which derives from the latter.

But today I want to talk to you about a third kind of “failure”; the main kind Autumn critiques in her post. The failure of trying to look beautiful… but not quite getting there. Autumn quotes Siobhan O’Connor of No More Dirty Looks:

“We had people privately e-mailing us and saying, I just can’t do it... I guess the mentality was, Well, if I look bad with no makeup, no big deal. But if you look bad with makeup—it’s like you’ve said to the world, This is the best I can do.”

I’m embarrassed to admit this, because it is in no way cool or strong or feministy, but a few days after my wedding to Mr Musings, I woke up and started crying. I cried and cried and cried and cried, for a whole hour. Maybe two.

I cried because I’d seen a bunch of photos our guests had uploaded to Facebook and, well, to say I didn’t like them was an understatement. It was hardly the first time I’d seen a photo of myself that I hated, but that these were photos of me as a bride made it sting all the worse. Because to paraphrase Siobhan O’Connor: “If you look bad as a bride – it’s like you’ve said to the world, This is the best I can do.”

I meant to write about this back when I was doing my “Feminist Wedding Planning” series, but I ran out of time. This idea that in putting on a white dress and getting our hair and make-up professionally done, we transform into something other than ourselves. The “bridal beauty myth” is the reason women spends thousands of dollars on dresses and photographers, starve themselves for a couple of months, and try out hairstyles and make-up they wouldn’t normally touch with a ten foot pole.

No one actually transforms themselves, and I knew that going in. But I still retained some trace of the belief that this was the best that I was ever going to look - certainly, the most effort I was ever going to put into looking “beautiful”.

Which was the crux of my horror, really. Because when I saw the offending photos I thought, “This isn’t the best that I can do!” And the idea that it might be, frankly, horrified me.

I felt like I hadn’t tried hard enough. I could have stopped eating chocolate the months leading up to the wedding in order to achieve that seductive but damaging to the psyche just-on-the-precipice-of-too-thin look! I could have reapplied my lipstick more often! I could have asked the hairdresser to give me a slightly bouncier blow dry!

But I didn’t do those things. Because while I considered altering my diet in the months leading up the wedding, the mirror, the scale and my clothes all told me I was “thin enough”. Because no one bothered to tell me to reapply my make-up on the night, and I was too busy eating and talking to people and having fun to think about it. Because even though it did cross my mind that my wedding day blow dry wasn’t quite nice as the one I’d had for my friend’s wedding a couple of weeks before, it looked nice enough, and I was in a hurry.

And because however much - and however wrongly - wedding planning is defined by an impossibly transcendent beauty ideal, it doesn’t actually impact the magic of the day. For me, that came through the singing, the dancing, the community and, you know, the actual getting married part.

To be honest, the insecure neurotic in me (which is not insubstantial), still wishes that I had tried a little harder. Not because I looked bad – I know I didn’t – but because it’s hard not to feel that way about a day in which photos are being taken of you from every angle.

As it happens, the official photos turned out great (even if, yes, I look thoroughly imperfect in them). This one is my favourite, for its hilariously triumphant expression*:

* Really, I was just saying hi to the friend in front of me.

Related: Your body is not a fashion statement.
Does this photo make me look phat? On cameras, beauty and surveillance culture
Welcome to the Institute for Sweet Valley High-related cultural studies

Elsewhere: On failure and the contradiction of beauty (The Beheld)