I need to admit that it was a challenge to plan our marriage and do our best to make it vegan and as zero waste as possible.
And it was in November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
However, we really enjoyed this challenge. And I made a great discovery that time – the Fb group: ‘Uwaga śmieciarka jedzie’ (for giving away the things you don’t need). I will write more about it below.
We were planning to organize a small ceremony after the marriage but finally, we resigned, because of the restrictions.
It is sad for me to see how much waste people produce just for one day of marriage. They especially buy a dress that they often never wear again. Or shoes only for this occasion. Or some flowers, just to throw them away later. We wanted to approach the topic differently.
I (Ariana) was considering using some of my old dresses, but I had nothing white. And it is also nice to wear something original on the day of your marriage, right? So, I found a Fb zero waste group and I asked for some advice. I was impressed with the support I received! Some women not only sent me some useful links but also offered to lend me their clothes! And you know what? I ended up having 5 amazing dresses!!! 😀 And none of them was mine, I returned them later.
The next step was to find a jacket and shoes (to remind you, it was NOVEMBER, in POLAND. No, we don’t have polar bears running on the street [although some people still believe so;] but the temperature can be very low, below zero. I wrote a post on the aforementioned Fb group ‘Uwaga śmieciarka jedzie’ that we are planning a vegan and zero-waste marriage and I also got amazing replies! As you can imagine, very often nice shoes are made of animal skin. And also jackets tend to contain some pieces of natural fur or wool. Not only I ended up having great shoes and a cool jacket but also it opened up some space for discussion. Some women were contacting me asking why I do not use products like wool and I was happy to explain it. If you are also wondering, you can check this article by PETA.
And tadaaam! My marriage clothes were nearly ready. Since it was cold, I needed to get some white tights. And it was the only thing I needed to buy. The price was 8pln, around 2,5 euro. And that was all I spent on my marriage outfit!
Accessories. First of all, we had to wear masks. So, I prepared them! I used an old white material that still looked nice and I sewed marriage masks for us!
The next thing – a bouquet. Well, to be honest, I (Ariana) don’t really like cut natural flowers. I prefer them to grow and stay in nature. I could have also used a broccoli head 😀 But we found another solution. We had a bouquet of plastic flowers that we brought from Turkey, from our friends’ marriage. Of course, plastic is far from being zero waste but since we had it, why not reuse it?
And we took one of the flowers as an addition to my hairstyle. I didn’t go to the hairdresser, I had Magda, my maid, and a friend next to me, who helped me amazingly! No hairspray, just a braid on my natural hair.
So, I can say that the cost of my (Ariana) marriage was 2,5 euros 😀 For Furkan it wasn’t that easy, unfortunately. It is simple to find a woman who wears a similar size of dress to mine, but to find a used suit for a man? We checked all possibilities and unfortunately, all ‘wedding’ suites had wool. A similar case we had with shoes – all of them were made of animal skin. That is why we bought all of them new. Generally, a wedding suit is really expensive. So we went just for a normal, black one, and the price was less than 50 euros. And we bought a pair of shoes online. Also, not ones with the ‘wedding’ etiquette, and the price was around 20 euros.
So, that’s it! We were happy to make this important day as wasteless as we could.
And it was definitely not the marriage that we imagined earlier – no guests, just online streaming for the closest people. But everything in life teaches us something. And it was a great reminder to us of what really matters. Marriage is a spiritual experience, a decision to spend your life with another person. The most important thing is how you truly feel about it and what it means for you, not how big a celebration you have or how fancy clothes you wear.
Since our marriage, we have become big fans of these zero waste Fb groups. We gave away many many things that we didn’t use much. We adore this approach – instead of buying something new – why not adopt it if someone does not need it? And we never know about the situations of others. Instead of throwing our things, like clothes, into the trash, we can give them a second thought – maybe someone can still use them?
