Before you can appear in a shoot for abbywinters.com your “grooming” must be top notch👌. By “grooming”, we mean how neat, clean, healthy and wholesome you look from day to day. For example,
If you had 15 mosquito bites on your legs, we’d consider that a grooming issue.
Of course, we all get these, and they are nothing to be embarrassed about! 😳 We’ll never make you feel bad about a grooming issue.
We have several pages of info about Grooming:
Overview of Grooming (you are here)
What a grooming issue is and isn’t
How to provide us grooming images
Tips for dealing with grooming issues
Why is grooming so important?
We never use Photoshop or makeup to cover skin blemishes, so the way you look on shoots is very important – our customers 👨 👩want to see you as you really are, not hiding things 🕵️♀️… but, they also don’t want to see “gross” 💩 things our bodies do to us sometimes!
Our customers want it real… but not too real, ya know?
What happens if I have a grooming issue?
Sometimes we can work around grooming issues. For example if you have a cut on your finger, a new neat bandaid 👩⚕️will fix this issue and the shoot can still go ahead!
But sometimes, hiding the issue starts to be a problem if it means hiding whole parts of your body from customers! For example:
It might seem logical to just not shoot your bottom if you have 10 big pimples on it… but many of our customers pay us because they really like naked bottoms! 🍑
So, not showing your bottom in the shoot is a real problem. In that situation, waiting until the pimples had healed would be best.
If we know about a potential problem ahead of the shoot, we can sometimes find a “workaround” that hides the issue without upsetting customers – and it also means we can share our tips with you on how to resolve grooming issues (over the years we have gathered quite a few!).
To hide a grooming issue, you may need to bring particular clothes 👘, and this is only possible if we know about the issue beforehand. For example;
If you had a big bruise on your shin, we might decide the shoot can still go ahead so long as you bring long colourful socks that will hide that bruise in the shoot.
This is not our preferred option, but if the alternate is rescheduling, we may opt for socks instead of no shoot at all.
Sooooo, please always be open and honest about grooming issues – if we know about things, we can deal with things together.
These are some grooming issues we’ll need to discuss with you. Not every issue means a shoot cannot go ahead but we need to have a plan!
What if I have a grooming issue on my shoot day?
First, your Shoot Producer will consult with the team to see if they can find a way the shoot can still happen (we have Shoot Producers all around the world, so we have key staff around the word as well, to cover timezones). Sometimes, we recommend to hide things or de-emphasise them – and sometimes, the grooming issue is not actually an issue at all!
If they decide your grooming is not suitable and cannot be “hidden” on the shoot day, we may need to reschedule your shoot to when your grooming is suitable.
Grooming problems usually fix themselves over time (or maybe with a little assistance), and a reschedule never means we do not want to shoot you 😱 – just that we cannot shoot you now. 😌
How do I know if my grooming is suitable?
We prefer to have an open and ongoing discussion with you about your grooming, so together we can work out how to make a great shoot. 💅🏽
We have found some models over-think grooming issues, panicking over tiny things that are no problem for us… other models are overly-casual and would happily shoot looking like they had just done five rounds in a boxing ring🥊!
This is why we ask for grooming images 🤳 before a shoot – not so we can judge 👩⚖️ how “perfect” you are – but so our Model Liaisons can guide you on what’s need (if anything) – so you can relax. 🙌
That means, our Model Liaisons will ask you questions about your grooming several times before the shoot, and we’ll ask you to send images of yourself several times in the lead up to the shoot.
When we get your images we’ll assess them, maybe ask you some questions. We may need to change your shoot date if the grooming issues seem serious.
Or, maybe the images you send indicate your grooming is all fine! We’ll let you know.
