Author: Melissa

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4 Tips to Prepare for Your Boudoir Shoot, plus a free guide to understanding lingerie!

For a great boudoir shoot, a little bit of preparation is so important.  You want to spend your shoot feeling amazing, beautiful, confident and sexy.  Here are my top tips to get the  most out of your boudoir experience.  

Tip one:  Shop for your boudoir wardrobe at least a month before your shoot:  

The most important part of preparing for your boudoir shoot is wardrobe.  Find a few different outfits that fit you perfectly and that you love.   

The last thing you want to be worrying about is whether those straps are digging into your skin or if the push up is creating an unnatural shape or creating unwanted gaps.  

Because lingerie can be super intimidating, especially if you haven’t worn it much, all of our sessions include wardrobe styling at Althea’s Fine Lingerie!  Althea has a true gift for fitting women in amazing lingerie that flatters their figures!  She will help you shop for items that are perfect for you.  You’ll feel so much better knowing you are rocking those outfits. 

We have created a guide to lingerie for you to review before your wardrobe fitting!!  Click here to check it out.   

Tip two:  Schedule your waxing, facial, mani pedi and any hair color appointments 48 hours before your shoot.  

Take the heat factor up a notch with a Brazilian wax!!!  I absolutely love Susan at Clean Slate Spa.  Her Brazilians are quick and virtually painless and will leave you feeling amazingly sexy. Everyone’s skin is different, so you want to allow at least 48 hours between your wax and your shoot, and you want at least 4 weeks of growth before any wax.   

Schedule any hair color touch ups at least 48 hour ahead of time also.  Do not make huge color changes within a few days of your shoot-you want to be sure you are happy with the results.  

And same goes for your mani pedi-you want to schedule this 24/48 hours before your shoot to be sure you are happy with everything!  I am often asked what the best color is for a mani pedi-you can’t go wrong with the classics – red, nude, or black, but any fun color that coordinates with your outfits and compliments your skin tone will work.  If you are in doubt, ask your nail tech!

Tip three:  Stay well hydrated, exfoliate, and moisturize.  24 hours before your shoot, drink LOTS of water, exfoliate your skin and use lots of moisturizer.  This will keep your skin super soft and smooth and exfoliating will help you get a closer shave on your legs.  I LOVE the Raw Sugar line sold at target-I use their exfoliating scrub, body wash and lotion in the lemon scent.  Yummy and invigorating.  

Tip Four: The day of your shoot!!  Eat breakfast, pack a snack, and open yourself up to the process! You are going to want your strength for the poses that I will be putting you in-I promise it will not show in your photos if you have breakfast that day! Most importantly, boudoir is very much a mental game and arriving open and ready for the experience and really tuning into why you are there and your goals for the shoot will help immensely. I have tips for this too and we go over that before your shoot!!

I hope these tips have been helpful!!!

I am so grateful to be able to do what I love, and am always honored when someone chooses me for their boudoir experience. Have a great day, babes!!!

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“Secret” Project

I am so excited to be working on my “secret” project again. That’s what it was called the first time, because I didn’t reveal the concept until the result was complete. 

21 women, sizes 0-20. I’ve done it twice now. Once in 2012 and once in 2016. I’d been hearing women say they needed to lose 10 pounds or they were too old or they had too many babies etc etc, and I wanted to prove them wrong.

As my business grew, I was able to get a more diverse set of volunteers the second time around, including many beautiful skin tones, cancer survivors, women up to 64 years old, and a powerlifter, to name a few. We don’t have to have breasts to be sexy. We don’t have to be 20 to be sexy. We don’t have to lose the baby weight to be sexy. We can be fluid, changing, growing. 

I am working to include trans women and gender queer/nonbinary peeps this time around ?️‍?. I would love to include disabled women. I would love to include a woman in her 70 or even older (my own grandmother continues to refuse me even though she is the cutest almost 80 year old woman you’ve ever seen and full of sass at that) ?. 

This project sets me on fire – I am so passionate in my conviction that boudoir is for everyone. We are all so beautiful in our individuality and should be empowered to embrace that beauty and our sexuality-whatever that means to us at the time.  I am so excited to see where this project takes me in 2019. Watch out for updates on my work and the project as it progresses!

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How did you get into this? Shooting Boudoir?

I get asked this question all the time.  You could say that I literally made it my job to help women love their bodies as a result of hating my own so much.

I always struggled with self image, was always just a little too curvy, never had that flat tummy to show off, and after having kids, things got exponentially worse for me.

I had a cervical condition that prevented me from exercising during pregnancy but we’ll be honest and say I wasn’t doing a lot exercise anyway. I had gained 30 pounds since getting married, and gained 35 more while pregnant.

I ended up with an emergency c section that left me with a floppy belly that hung over my scar. That softness, combined with stretch marks and the heartless effect of gravity left me devastated with my appearance.

At the time I hadn’t shot boudoir professionally yet. It was just becoming more popular nationwide, and a photographer friend of mine suggested photographing me to try it out.

I was maybe 3 months postpartum with my second baby, and the photographer used the equivalent of a spotlight in a dark room to light the portraits. That combined with winging the posing . . . . . to say the results were bad is definitely an understatement. I cried for DAYS.

I decided that this couldn’t ever happen to anyone again, and made the decision to start shooting boudoir myself. I didn’t want any woman to ever hate herself the way I did, and set out to create a space where all bodies could be seen for the beauty they are, and could be celebrated and loved. This is why I specialize in shooting boudoir for women of all shapes and sizes.

A lot of other happy things came out of that day-I joined a gym, started getting serious about my health, and got the confidence I needed to leave my unhappy marriage. During that journey I decided to just.be.happy. To stop fighting it and love my body and commit to loving it going forward.

It was so FREEING.

CHOOSING happiness in my body and letting go of all that angst was a ridiculous weight off my shoulders. To embrace the concept that you can love yourself while also trying to improve your heath – why these concepts are often mutually exclusive, I don’t know.

All of this said, there are still days I struggle. Days I look at my softness and stretch marks and think how I’ll never have flawless skin or an eight pack (I need my chocolate). But it doesn’t take long for me to snap out of it and refocus on the gloriousness of self love.

What is YOUR biggest struggle with loving yourself and what do you do to try to overcome that challenge?

I would love to hear all of your answers!!!

SelfLove