New year, old blog revived

The world of beauty, fashion, and style blogging has become a cacophony of product reviews, shopping hauls, and photoshopped pictures of wannabe model/bloggers for as long as I can remember.  Don't forget, I started this blog years ago (in 2010) and also jumped on the bandwagon, wasting time and money on products, clothes, and accessories that just don't matter any more. Not that I regret having this blog, though you may have noticed that some (many) pages have been unpublished, for it's a reminder of how far I've come in my quest for beauty and style. 

Cleaning up this blog has been an interesting mixture of embarrassment and envy. I'm embarrassed of the contents, and yet envious of my previous youthful naivety.  In fact, I was so embarrassed, I wanted to unpublish the entire blog, start a new one like my sister always did at the end of each "era", but then you wouldn't know how long I've been doing this or how I've been guilty of all that I criticize.  It's good to show where I'm coming from, even if slightly filtered by a wiser eye.

Original purpose

I remember starting this blog to document my China findings, knowing that the beauty standards, practices, and beliefs are different in Asia than in the West. When our plans to relocate fell short, or were postponed as it turned out, I turned Defining Beauty into a run-of-the-mill blog where I shared my search for beauty and style.  

Now, you might wonder why I didn't blog about my journey once we moved to China in 2012, and I can tell you there were two reasons:

1) blogger.com was blocked by the great China firewall

2) I didn't think about fashion until maybe the year after (2013)

I want to elaborate on the latter, but that's for another post...

New purpose

Defining Beauty will have posts about Asian beauty and fashion, etc., but will also include more personal posts about beauty and style related topics, such as my capsule wardrobe project and quest for simple living (with less "stuff").  Recently, I've made a lot of progress and would like to share how I've let go of things I've been holding on to for years and how I continuously work at building our family's simple lifestyle. Hopefully, there'll come a day when I can confidently write about how I've got this down and all figured out, but for now it's all still a work-in-progress.

Either way, I hope to meet like-minded individuals and learn from my readers through the revival of Defining Beauty.