Getting Ready in Newcastle: A Daytime Clubbing Beauty Guide
A running order for a Dreamworx Saturday, from what to book in advance to what actually needs to be in your bag.
Work backwards from the door time and do the wet jobs first. For a three o'clock start that means hair washed the night before, anything you are paying someone else to do booked for the morning, and your own face done last, unhurried, in a room that is not full of steam. Getting ready for daytime clubbing goes wrong when you treat it like a night out and start at six.
The difference is daylight. Dreamworx runs through the afternoon rather than the night, so you get ready in daylight, you walk into town in it, and you come back out at nine into the dark. Everything you do in the morning has to work in all three.
Decide What Someone Else Is Doing
Pick one thing to pay for and do the rest yourself. For most people that is hair, because it is the job that takes longest and looks most obviously different when a professional has done it.
Whatever you choose, book it two to three weeks ahead for a Saturday and ask for a morning slot. An appointment that finishes at one leaves you a calm hour. An appointment that finishes at two leaves you in a taxi doing your lipstick.
What It Costs
Getting ready costs whatever you decide it costs, and the honest answer is that most of it is optional. A blow dry in the North East usually lands somewhere in the twenties to the forties, nails a similar sort of range depending on what you have done, and everything else you can do at home for nothing.
- Worth paying for: the one job you cannot do to the same standard yourself.
- Worth buying once: a gripping primer and a long wear setting spray, about the price of a round.
- Not worth it: anything brand new you have never tried, bought that week. A big day out is a bad day to test something.
Set a number before you start booking. Three separate appointments quietly turn into a proper spend.
The Night Before Does Half the Job
Wash your hair on the Friday. Most styles hold better on hair with a day on it, and it takes an hour off your morning.
Lay out everything you are wearing, including the shoes and the coat, and check the fastenings. Charge your phone and put a card and your keys in the bag you are actually taking. Nails, if you are doing them yourself, get done in the evening rather than the morning, because polish takes longer to harden than it feels like it does.
The Order to Do Things In
Shower first and give the bathroom twenty minutes to clear before you start on your face. Makeup applied in a steamy room slides off in a warm one.
Then hair, then skincare, then makeup, then clothes. Doing your hair after your makeup means heat, product mist and your arms up by your face for twenty minutes, and you will end up patching the base you just did.
Eat something properly at lunchtime. A three o'clock start with a six hour run at it is a long stretch on a piece of toast.
Getting Into Town
Sort out how you are getting in and how you are getting home before you leave, because at nine o'clock in October it will be dark, cold and busy, and you will not want to be working it out then.
If you are heading to Dreamworx at Digital, the Metro is usually the least stressful way in and out of the city centre on a Saturday, and it saves you standing on a kerb at the end. If someone is dropping you, agree the pick-up point while everyone is still sober enough to remember it. If you are going down to the Quayside afterwards, factor in the walk back up the bank in whatever you have put on your feet.
What Goes in the Bag
Small bag, across the body, because you will be holding it for six hours and dancing with it on.
- Your lip product, and only that one.
- Blotting papers, which do the job people wrongly ask powder to do.
- A spare hair tie, and grips if your hair is up.
- Card, keys, phone, and a plaster in case of new shoes.
Leave your foundation at home. Topping up foundation over six hours is how a good base turns patchy.
Coming Out at Nine
You will come out warm into a cold night, which is the one thing daylight getting-ready never accounts for. Have a layer you can put on outside and take off inside, and choose a coat you would not mind leaving in a cloakroom.
Six hours of flashbacks, which is what we call the tracks you already know every word of, will have done for your hair by then and that is fine. Take the grips out, shake it, and go.