To begin: welcome to the newly revamped Buro. Singapore!

It seems only apt that our theme this month is around feeling ‘Expressive’ – for what better way is there for us to showcase and embody this, than to truly express ourselves through our revitalized look and feel! We’re still the bold, playful, smart, sexy, witty and awareness-driven site you’ve come to know and love, just with the added zest of an interface and user experience that embodies the fun and creativity you’ve come to expect of us.

Amongst the bright colours and exciting words, you’ll find we’re still bringing you the best across our four key pillars: Fashion, Beauty, Lifestyle, Culture and introducing our brand-new pillar: Success. Focusing on all things career, money and self-enhancement, ‘Success’ brings together the various elements of navigating millennial life across these key focus areas through interesting, insightful and informative content that you can both enjoy and learn from.

If there’s one thing re-launching our website has taught me: it’s an odd thing being in the digital publishing realm at times. We seem to face a unique set of challenges when it comes to maintaining quality standards, continuity and of course, consistency, when it comes to our product – in a way that print sometimes may not have to. There is no downtime for digital; no way to think ahead always. Things happen in the now – gone as soon as they occur, yet somehow permanently marked forever. What happens in the moment, is seen in that moment; making it incredibly hard to mask things as they go rightly or wrongly. It unlocks a kind of unique adrenaline rush when you hit the target right, and an even more permeating fear when you miss it.

But as I think of this month’s theme – that feeling is a perfect summation of what real self-expression feels like to me. Sometimes you nail it. Other times, you try to find a better way to do so.

As we pulled together our content for September, I found myself thinking squarely about the stereotypes of what ‘expression’ is and who ‘expressive’ people are. A slew of incredibly talented creative names danced through my mind, from musicians to painters to creative directors to designers to poets to writers. It’s almost as though my brain was convincing me that to be considered expressive, you have to come from a slant of traditional ‘creativity’, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality? You can be an engineer and still express yourself. Or a doctor. Or a carpenter. Or a forensic blood scientist. Your profession or status or title or rank or paycheck doesn’t define how or what you express, you do. Who you are, what characteristics you embody, your journey and individual stories, your desires, your fears, your endless thoughts and learnings – these are surely, the true marks of expression? And isn’t it really just first and foremost for you, not for anyone else?

Most profoundly, whilst it’s not fashionably-cool to label emotions as positive or negative anymore, the distinctive element of expression is that it seems to neutralize the notion of good or bad entirely. It does so by simply allowing emotions to exist. Whatever you feel, however you feel it or show it – it’s yours to express and no one can dismiss it. Why? Because it’s yours and yours alone. What more uniting force can there be than that?

So, as we celebrate expressing ourselves in our new digital outfit, we want to inspire you to do so too. Be it through enjoying insights from culinary geniuses across Singapore and their stories on a plate, to hearing the personal journey of one of Singapore’s leading musical artists, Jon Chua on self-acceptance or to drawing inspo from our Autumn/Winter 2021 fashion feature in partnership with the Ice Cream Museum pop-up. We hope we got you feeling all kinds of expressive.

For now, please have a click around and soak up the fun, playful and bold new vibes of Buro. Singapore. We can’t wait to bring you more in the days to come!

Rahat x