Miss Beatice Abla Senoo, a Wedding Planner in Ho, has urged dealers in wedding paraphernalia to combine dealership with honest sales advice to customers to beat down the cost of weddings.
She said dealers must, therefore, engage sales staff with the fortitude to explain the options in the range of goods to their clients rather than foist the often over priced wares on them.
Miss Senoo, who was speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA), conceded that the choice of wedding wares depended on the budgets of the couples and families involved.
"Yes, there are the choices of the low-key, modest, the average and the flamboyant", Miss Senoo said.
She said, however, that ignorance of the choices often led wedding shoppers to over-spend to the detriment of stable marriages.
"It is a special area, which needs personal sales approach and that should be the contribution of the dealers to stable marriages for all the profit they make", Miss Senoo stated.
She said the time had come for designers to blend western nuptial dress codes with local ones to cut down cost and to give some unique Ghanaian looks to brides especially, bridegrooms and the nuptial retinues.
Miss Senoo said the current situation in which most brides and bridegrooms don western style dresses constituted a challenge to Ghanaian designers.
Regarding bleaching, especially among women, she expressed worry that even educated women, who should know the dangers yield to the dreadful notion that the fairer a woman was the more beautiful she was considered to be.
Miss Senoo said, however, that some women got inadvertently bleached when treating acne with inappropriate creams and soaps.
She cautioned that people, who got their skins damaged through bleaching, might have to spend up to 2.5 million cedis or more for correctional treatment and even in some cases die from the effects of such corrosive creams.
Miss Senoo alleged that some women go to the extent of using ground bottles mixed with bleaching detergents and creams on their bodies to get bleached.