Beautifulnow Story

It came out of a dark place. I had just finished up a two year massive renovation project and I was exhausted. After two explosions, five serious floods, and four lawsuits, to name only a few of the many nightmares, I finally slumped into a pile of negativity.

Many people suggested that I write a book about my ordeals, but the thought of spending another year or two of my life reliving the horrors, made me feel even worse. I needed a new project that could help me feel better. But as I looked around for what might become my next venture, I wasn’t inspired. No matter where I turned, all I found was bad news – wars, violence, poverty, natural and manmade disasters, crime, disease, crisis, recession, political nastiness... Story after story full of ugly things. Where could my inspiration come from out of all of this? Then, one day, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, wallowing, I happened to look up in time to see a beam of sunlight shoot through the glass wall in my new master bathroom, hit the malachite vanity top, stripe across, curling over the edge and down the cabinet, across the Arabascato floor, licking its way up the curvy side of the bathtub, and higher to a fuschia-blossomed orchid sitting on top of the sidewall. Yes, it’s corny, but it made me gasp. Answer: focus on beauty.

I gave myself an exercise: to find at least one beautiful thing every day – and to capture it. I found, once I started looking, that there was beauty happening in all kinds of places, from museums and landscapes to my own backyard to places I can’t even see with my naked eye.

Beauty isn’t everything. But it is something very important. Whether it’s something you possess or something you behold, beauty helps you in life. It helps us to feel better, think better, and do better. It helps us to love. It’s something that we are always yearning for. It’s an inspiration, aspiration, and comfort, all in one. There are hundreds of clichés about beauty, because it strikes universal chords -- not because we universally agree on what beauty is or isn’t, but because, whatever it is, it touches us all very deeply. Even surface beauty satisfies something deep.

Beauty can be hard to find and hard to find time for. There’s an abundance of mediocre, dark, sad, shocking, boring, ugly, scary, and bad stuff all around us. Beauty exists in many places, but there was no easy way to search for it.

I wanted to create a place where people with a passion for beauty could discover, create, and share beauty in all aspects of life -- a life “curated-for-beauty.” So I created BeautifulNow. Since then, the BN Team and the BeautifulNow Community have grown and we keep growing! We look forward to exploring the most beautiful parts of our world together with you!

Shira White
Founder