Punctuation is rarely innocent. Maxine Leeds Craig opens her edited volume Beauty Politics with a verdict: "Beauty is political." The period does real work. It closes the case. It announces a conclusion. And for a moment, the reader braces for a familiar argument: Beauty standards are instruments of oppression, full stop. But then the second paragraph begins with the same three words—"Beauty is political"—and this time ends in a comma. That comma is a quiet act of intellectual honesty. It says: Wait. There is more. Beauty is political, and. The reduction undoes itself before the introduction is finished.
The same impulse to simplify runs through most public conversations about beauty. Either beauty standards are oppressive by nature, or they are innocent expressions of personal taste. Either beauty politics is a serious subject, or it is vanity dressed up in theory. These binaries are comfortable. They are also inadequate. What we need is not a verdict but a framework, a way of asking better questions. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum offers one.
Martha Nussbaum, one of the most influential philosophers working today, gives us two particularly useful tools. The first is a framework for understanding objectification: not as a simple accusation to hurl at anything aesthetically charged, but as a diagnostic.
In a landmark 1995 essay, "Objectification," she identified several features that characterize treating a person as an object rather than a subject: using someone as a mere instrument for others' ends, treating people as interchangeable and replaceable, and denying both their autonomy and their inner experience. The crucial insight is that these features exist on a spectrum and depend heavily on context. Appreciating someone's appearance is not automatically objectification. The framework is a set of questions, not a verdict. Her second tool is the capabilities approach, which asks a different but complementary question: What does a person need in order to fully flourish? Her list includes bodily integrity, emotional development, and the ability to form and pursue their own conception of a good life. Together, these frameworks reframe the central question. Beauty standards are no longer simply good or bad. Instead, we must ask whether a particular norm expands or diminishes human capacity.
That beauty is used to oppress is undeniable. We have only to think about how companies market skin-lightening creams. They promise to help women advance in their careers and be more likely to get married. While skin-lightening creams have medical uses, like treating some dermatological conditions, those uses alone could not sustain that billion-dollar industry.
The skin-lightening industry, along with its marketing, manufactures insecurity. They work first by convincing people that a natural feature of their appearance is a liability, then positioning their product as the solution. This is Nussbaum’s objectification framework made visible: Autonomy is denied when the choice to purchase is shaped by a norm the person had no hand in creating and no power to contest.
Margaret Hunter, in “Colorism and the Racial Politics of Beauty,” makes the honest observation that using such products can be a rational response to a discriminatory world. That may be true. But it is a choice no one would make if darker skin were not held against them in the first place.
The counterexample doesn't have to be hypothetical. Consider the late Iris Apfel. Her style was unmistakable: oversized glasses, bold colors, layered jewelry, and combinations that ignored many conventional expectations about age, elegance, and restraint. Her influence did not come from perfectly embodying an existing standard of beauty. It came from expanding what beauty could look like. Rather than narrowing possibilities, her aesthetic choices created new ones. She demonstrated, in other words, what a capability looks like when it is fully exercised.
Brands are not neutral. They actively and intentionally shape how norms are imposed on people. The question is whether they do so consciously and with a sense of responsibility. Does your brand diminish people or elevate them? Does it force a standard of beauty onto someone, or does it help people discover new ways of being beautiful and exercising their autonomy? Does it manufacture the insecurity it then offers to resolve? These are not merely ethical questions; they are strategic ones. Brands that expand their customers' sense of possibility build a different kind of loyalty than brands that profit from chronic dissatisfaction. If you are not asking these questions, you run the risk of unintentionally diminishing the very people you depend on.
Remember, beauty is political. But the comma reminds us that is not the end of the sentence. Beauty is political, and. The "and" is where the industry carries both its ethical responsibility and its greatest opportunity. The goal is not to declare beauty innocent or guilty. It is to develop the judgment to tell the difference—to ask, of every product, every campaign, every standard quietly promoted: Does this expand what it means to be beautiful, or does it quietly narrow it? That capacity for discernment is what taste, properly understood, actually is.
