Welcome To Something New: A Week All About Weddings

Well, it's wedding season. Which means that, if you're a millennial, you're now spending your weekends either sobbing with joy as you watch your best friends join each other in holy (or unholy) matrimony or, alternatively, breathing into a paper bag as you check your bank balance after paying for that last-minute wedding present, a new dress, accommodation and train tickets for the next one.

Despite the fact that one of the biggest weddings of the year (and, well, ever) – that of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry – is taking place this weekend, we were more excited to hear how you guys do weddings. Because it's safe to say that, thanks to the incredible individuality we find among R29 readers, no one wedding is going to be the same. And so we present to you Something New, an entire week dedicated to weddings, which we're running in partnership with bridal makeup experts Bobbi Brown.

We're going to be looking at weddings from a bunting-free angle, from women getting married for the second time to women who eschewed the designer dress and wore their grandmother's instead. We're talking to people who made their weddings work on teeny tiny budgets (as opposed to the quite staggering £27,500 average) and people who had to figure out how to bring two different cultures together for one big day of celebrations.

We'll also be taking to task the lack of diversity in the wedding industry – look out for our piece from a blogger on how it felt to plan her wedding as a woman of colour when everything, from blogs to magazines to dresses to hairstyles, seemed to be aimed at white women. Plus, if you're after wedding inspiration for your natural hair, keep an eye out for our shoot later on in the week...

There's plenty more besides, including a deep dive (if you will) into the truth about wedding night sex, a single woman's plea to stop setting her up with the waiters during the reception, and the bridesmaid who missed her £900 flight to her best friend's hen do. Ugh.

So stick with us during this, the most wedding-y week of the year, and we promise to keep you entertained. And there isn't a fascinator or a cupcake in sight.