From Saturday, March 1, to Saturday, April 12, 2025 pretty Venus goes retrograde. “Retrograde means she’s sleeping. She’s resting,” famed astrologer Susan Miller tells Allure. “Venus rests every 18 months, so not very often.” Venus retrograde is notoriously disliked, especially among beauty lovers. When a planet appears to move backwards in the sky, the areas of your life it rules—in Venus’s case, that’s love, money, and, most importantly for our purposes, beauty—become sluggish. It’s why communication is so awful during pesky Mercury retrograde, which happens at a much higher frequency than Venus’s. “Conventional wisdom about Venus retrograde is very one dimensional,” says Tali Edut of the AstroTwins. “Don’t fall in love, don’t update your look, don’t date anyone new, but we know that that’s not really what happens in life.”
Even I, a professional astrologer who previously used electional astrology to choose the timing of my nose job, have broken these retrograde rules before. The counterpart to feminine Venus, Mars, the erotic action planet, was retrograde from December 6, 2024, to February 23, 2025. Because Mars is associated with, well, things shaped like penises, the conventional beauty wisdom for Mars retrograde is to skip anything involving needles, like tattoo, piercing, and injectable appointments. But I went ahead and kept a Botox appointment I was looking forward to anyway. The result was honestly the best Botox I’ve had in a while. It left me wondering: Could I ignore conventional Venus retrograde advice, too?
“I wouldn’t ever ignore Venus retrograde,” Edut says. “This is not a time to just settle down in the salon chair and go, ‘I don’t know, do something different and fun.’” Instead, Edut advises, use the time to gather inspiration for a change you make once the planet goes direct. If you already have an appointment you can’t cancel, prepare as much as you can. “You want to go in with pictures, you want to have a consultation with your stylist, you want to have an AI generated picture of what you’ll look like with that style first,” Edut says.
This year’s retrograde falls in a way that might warrant additional caution when it comes to drastic makeovers. As Miller explained to me, Venus retrograde begins in Aries on Saturday, March 1, and stays in Aries through Thursday, March 27, when it shifts into Pisces, before going direct in the water sign on Saturday, April 12. Each sign rules different parts of the body, and Aries rules the head. As a result, traditional wisdom says that you really shouldn’t do anything drastic to your appearance during that first part of this Venus retrograde.
