You’ve hired a professional photographer for your wedding day so that you will have every moment captured beautifully. Your friends are also bringing along their little point and shoots, iPhones, even iPads, and you can guarantee that your friend’s photos will make it to the web faster than your photographer’s. Even though your photographer should know how to correctly use flash photography and make corrections to the photos in post production to be sure you look your most flattering, we’ve still got your friend’s chintzy and hard to control flashes to deal with. Your best bet (besides banning all cameras from your wedding) is to apply makeup that will help diminish the horrid shiny spots and ghost face effects that can potentially hit Facebook faster than you can even get to your getaway car.

Here are some tips for wedding day makeup that is flash friendly:

• STAY AWAY FROM THE TRANSLUCENT FACE POWDER! This is one of the biggest no-no’s I can give you if you want to avoid looking like a zombified bride. Translucent powders tend to look white when the flash goes off. Instead, reach for a powder with yellow tint to bring back some of that color. And make sure your foundation is very close to your natural skin tone for better more natural blending.

• Don’t keep reapplying your powder! A little after dancing might be okay, but the more you add, the more ghostly you will appear on Facebook, and you do not want that! Instead, keep blotting papers in your arsenal and BLOT, do not WIPE.

• Natural light is always the best light. Whoever is doing your makeup, be it you, a friend, or a hired makeup artist, should set up by a window in your bridal room. This will give you the best results for the most important makeup application of your life.

• Glitter and shimmer sure do look pretty, but know that flash is just going to make it look like big washed out splotches, making you even look greasy and sweaty. Stick to mattes for your eyeshadows and blushes.

• There is a myth about SPF and camera flash. SPF is important to apply if you’re having a wedding on a sunny day, especially if you’re having an outdoor wedding. As much as you think you’ll be able to stick to the shade or duck inside, truth is you will be standing in the same place for at least an hour while every single person you invited and your guests invited will reintroduce themselves to you and demand a photograph. Nobody wants to be a sunburned bride, not to mention it’s probably worse to be a lobster in your wedding pictures than a ghost.

• This is a tip recommended more toward making you pro photographer happy. Black and white photos are very popular these days, and some brides are opting to have everything done entirely in black and white. If you are this bride, be sure to wear a deeper shade of lipstick than you normally would so that there is more contrast between your lips and the rest of your face.

• Don’t forget to give your eyebrows some definition with a color as close to their natural color as possible. Eyebrows tend to get all swallowed up with a flash and that’s no good for pictures. Not much, just a little.

• Imperfections and blemishes on your arms, chest, or back? Be sure to cover them as well. One bride I know had a very bad case of acne on her back and chose to wear a backless gown anyway. Though she was able to clear most of it up with medicine, she still opted to have a professional airbrush her back to make it look as natural as possible while hiding the blemishes. I could hardly tell there was a problem!

• Now that you have all of these new tips, practice applying your wedding day makeup several weeks in advance, and photograph them (flash on of course!) to see how it looks. So much examination could help you catch problems early and give you another chance to make last minute corrections to coloring and application and blending techniques. Don’t feel like you’re practicing too much! We’re looking at the one day in your life where you will be photographed the most you will ever be photographed. Make sure everything is perfect!

• Pass these tips along to your wedding party as they are going to be in a lot of formal photographs and informal ones, and they’ll probably also be taking duckface photos with their cell phones in the mirror. Hey, your maid of honor may be a Duckface Donna at heart, but you care enough about her to give her such an important role in your wedding so why not give her some photography friendly beauty tips, too.

Even with all these tips and being paranoid of bad photos ending up on the internet without the slightest bit of care as to how unflattering they may be, the key to makeup is always that less is more. Let your natural beauty shine through and use the makeup to enhance your features and correct imperfections. Accentuating your high cheek bones or bright blue eyes is going to make you the most real looking and therefore most beautiful bride you can possibly be.