Interview with Peony Lim: On Fashion, Art and Baking Ideas

If you look at her website, Peony Lim lives the perfect life and her words are really a treasure for ideas, inspirations and lifestyle: Instagram-approved recipes that will enchant your guests, stunning photo shoots around the world, beautiful houses in London and LA, without forgetting perfect ideas for a dream house and fashion tips to be always on point. If you look for something classy, but also beautifully crafted and inspiring, Peony Lim’s world is a must-visit. Recently married and into blogging since 2009, with an academic background in Art History and her first online boutique opened in 2011, Peony is one of the most sought-after influencers in London, with an established but also ever-growing fame for her versatility and exceptional taste not only in fashion but also beauty, DIYs, cooking and lifestyle.

We went to her home in London to chat with Peony Lim about her style, her dreams and, of course, to discover what she likes most about fashion and what’s her signature makeup look!

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What’s the thing about your work that makes you feel the happiest?
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I think creative freedom. I feel there are so many jobs where you wouldn’t get real freedom, while I get to say “yes” or “no” to whatever I want to do, which is rare.

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You got in touch with the Fashion Weeks world quite early, when you were still in University. How did you get the idea for the website?
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I went to University right by where they had the Fashion Weeks at the time. It was kind of the beginning of the work by Vanessa Jackman, Tommy Ton, Scotts Shuman, photographers like that. They were all taking my pictures so, by the time that I was coming towards the end of my graduation, I had known them for a couple of years and they were asking me what I was going to do after I finished my studies. When I told them that I was taking the summer off they told me: why don’t you start blogging? You can just try it for the summer and you might enjoy it. Because they were obviously all bloggers at the time. And so I started my own website and I gave them all the link so they could link their site back to mine, and that was it. The first month I had a contract, so it was professional since the very first month.

“It was professional since the very first month.”

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About the food section on your website: the recipes are amazing! What’s your go-to recipe and what’s your favorite one?
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I really love this goat cheese and garlic tart, I always want to eat that and I also enjoy it very much. And also there’s a chocolate pie in the website, and every single time I make it people love it: it’s this chocolate pie with peanut butter and whipped cream on top. That’s a winner.

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About the DYI part of the blog, how do you look for inspiration for that?
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I love Pinterest, and I think that sometimes if you are planning a party or a specific experience it can be really great to solidify your ideas visually. But I think that, broadly, all your creative inspiration comes from just going out and living your life. You have to go and travel, visit galleries, walk in nature and do all of those things. So all of those things are coming to your head like a cake mix and then you bake it, and… you get the cake in the end.

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And also in London, there are a lot of inputs, especially from Art and Museums!
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I think we’re so lucky in London, especially because most of the museums are free: so you can just walk into the Victoria&Albert at any time, which is amazing.

“All of those things are coming to your head like a cake mix…”

“…then you bake it,
and
you get the cake in the end.”

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What are your favorite beauty trends?
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I feel that both my fashion and beauty taste is quite classic.
I don’t tend to change in terms of trends, it’s more about how I like my face to look.
For a long time, I liked the black eyeliner because for me the reference was Old Hollywood, and that was what I was doing: I was having Grace Kelly as a reference. End then it became very much a pop culture thing and now it’s everywhere on the associations like Youtube, much more like very full-front of makeup, and for me, that’s not an aesthetic highlight as much. So I kind of moved away from that and now I ever hardly wear eyeliner and I much more like a contour to the lid, which is kind of more nude. And in the winter I like to do this ashy-greyer and brown tones, while in the summer it becomes more kind of pinks and oranges and bronzes. And I think I’ve always loved red lipstick, and that a red lip will always be good and it’s a good color for everyone: a darker color in winter and a brighter color in summer.

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The three beauty products you would bring with you to a desert island?
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I feel like, if I didn’t have a moisturizer, the entireness of your skin would make you want to kill yourself. So I’d probably take the La Mer classic cream because that’s also usable as an oil for your hands and if you have chapped lips or are sunburned you can really use it everywhere.
Then I think I’d have an SPF because, again, I feel like you’d want to die if you don’t have the right protection. And then probably a cleanser, because in that situation I feel like you get to the point when you just really need to keep things clean. So I have my cleanser, my SPF and my moisturizer.

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A perfect outfit for your day out in London?
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I think you always need a light jacket, because in London even summer can be cold, suddenly, for no reason! Like denim jacket, and khaki, which are layerable and they’re light to carry if you decide to take it off.

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What’s your tip to all the girls out there that are still struggling to find their own style?
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I don’t think that many people who are creative are creative without a struggle. That’s part of being different, and struggle…you really shouldn’t see it as a negative thing. It’s positive, it’s pushing you, it’s a challenge to be a little bit different, to do things that other people aren’t doing. I think the worst thing to do is to conform to something that doesn’t feel natural to you. You should just be yourself and the truest version of yourself. And ultimately it doesn’t really matter what others think: it’s what you think that matters.

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Do you have a female inspiration you look up to?
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Not really celebrities or anything like that, but I have a huge amount of respect and love for my mother, who is an amazing woman.
My mother is very beautiful and she always said, “no matter what you look like because all that people are going to remember about you is how you make them feel.”

“You should just be yourself and the truest version of yourself.”

B E
I N S P I R E D

B E
Y O U R S E L F

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What’s the book on your night table?
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At the moment there is “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and there is “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman. But having never read any trashy novel in my life, suddenly for my honeymoon I decided to buy three Jilly Cooper stories.
I never read them as a teenager, and I’ve always thought that, if you’re reading something, you should read something significant, something that can stretch your mind. but I actually thought that it is the moment of my life to actually indulge in something just for pleasure and that has no purpose, for me! So I’ve indulged in them and I’m really excited.

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What’s your favorite spot in London?
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Is it bad to just like your own home? I love being at home with my dog and my husband, is that sad?! [laughs]

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And your favorite IG Account?
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I’d always try to answer with professional, kind of beautiful accounts but the one I actually, without fail, would always watch is this one. This girl is from Thailand and all she posts is different street food and Thai food. I don’t know what half the food is, but it just fascinates me: she’s called “pp. Happymeal.“
And it’s all videos of people in restaurants, making the food, it’s very addictive. She must collaborate with all the places because they let her shoot the kitchens. I just want to taste everything, this is like a kiwi brownie, some kind of matcha ice cream, and then you’re like, “what is the orange stuff?”
It’s fascinating and it’s soothing.

“I love being at home

with my dog

and my husband.”

“No matter what you look like, because all that people are going to remember about you is how you make them feel.”

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What’s the last movie you loved?
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“The Dressmaker.”
It’s not a movie I wanted to see when it came out, to be honest. I felt like it didn’t get that much promo, you didn’t see them doing the press altogether. But I was on an airplane on a work trip to LA, and the movie was just kind of there, moreover, I was in the time zone when I just had to stay awake for the whole flight, so I watched like seven movies. I went through everything I desperately wanted to watch. But that was a new release and I felt like it had so much resonance. It had such a powerful feeling of what Australia must be like or must’ve been like at that time, at least for me, even though I’ve never been there. It’s the same thing that “Atonement” does for England, you can almost smell what the land must’ve smelled like in that time, and I love that film.
It really stayed with me afterwards.

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Do you have a dream project?
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I think that there are so many things I would want to do and I believe that, mostly, the things I want to do now are more product collaborations rather than content collaborations. I’ve been lucky enough to do a huge amount of content collaboration with many different brands I wouldn’t have been fantasizing to collaborate with. From Chanel to all the other brands I’ve been so lucky to work with. But I think I would love to do a curation of beauty products, like my ten favorite beauty products that you could buy– that would be such a cool concept. I would also love to release homewares, and I think a food book would be amazing. I would love to do kind of a combination of party planning and food together because I don’t think there’s ever been a good home guidebook; a lot of people tried to do it but none of them really resonated, it all feels quite superficial. It doesn’t feel like they’re actually living that life.
So I would love to do one or see one, that feels really genuine and authentic.

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What’s next for the business?
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I feel like the business is going through a lot of change at the moment, it’s so busy and I’m at a limit on how much work I can take on without expanding quite a bit. I’ve been in the industry for nearly ten years now, it’s quite a long time and it’s time to re-asset some kind of logistics and some kind of business management. There are a lot of internal changes.
Probably you would not see differences as a reader, but it’ll mean just that we can perform better and produce more content.
I think in general I’m just getting older and I hope that the audience is kind of growing with me: I have a much more mature audience than the most part of the Instagram Generation because I’ve been going so long. I’m married, I have a home and we want to have a family: that’s a very different take on life then when I was 22 years old and all I cared about was what shoes I was wearing. I love fashion still and I love sharing my outfits, but I see it as much more utilitarian now than it was when I was younger.

When I was younger it was much more about peacocking and I loved to express myself in that way, now I find verbal expression more important to me.

Photos by Johnny Carrano.