Beauty has no universal standard. If that is true, then aesthetic judgment should not have an objective right or wrong either. And yet people constantly talk as if standards do exist: taste, originality, artistic sensitivity, fashion instinct, refinement.
So what are these judgments actually measuring?
A line I came across recently framed it in a provocative way: aesthetic sense is the one part of upbringing you can’t fake. That idea is interesting precisely because taste is usually discussed as something personal, even subjective. I still think aesthetics is inseparable from subjectivity, but that does not mean it appears out of nowhere.
If beauty has no fixed benchmark, then the standards people seem to perceive around it must be anchored somewhere else. One possibility is comparison. Many abstract things work like this. Happiness, for example, is often recognized only in contrast to someone else’s unhappiness. Without a clear standard, we search for reference points.
But there is another way to look at it: what if aesthetic judgment is not mainly a matter of comparison, but a form of cognition built from the inside out?
Subjectivity and taste: why do I think something is beautiful?
Start with a simple example: buying clothes.
When you consider a piece of clothing, what are you really responding to? The model wearing it? Your belief that it suits you? Your understanding of your own skin tone, height, proportions, and the rest of your wardrobe? In reality, most people do not make purchases through a fully rational checklist. Often it is much simpler: it looks good, so they want it.
But why does it look good?
Imagine someone who is 168 cm tall looking at clothing presented on a model who is 185 cm. They may genuinely find the outfit attractive while completely overlooking proportion. Then the item arrives, they try it on, and something feels off. Looking back, the original sense of beauty came from seeing the item displayed in an objective setting that had very little to do with their own reality.
Labels and beauty
Clothing, videos, luxury goods—these are highly label-driven categories. When a product carries strong brand premium, the item itself is often no longer the main thing. What matters is the social label it projects.
That is why some styling content has moved in the opposite direction: away from the object’s label and back toward the label of the person. For example, some fitting videos use faceless figures or cover the face entirely so viewers do not project a particular individual identity onto them. Instead, the body type becomes the symbol: narrow frame, solid build with a belly, slightly chubby girl, petite girl, and so on. Once the individual is stripped away and replaced by a strong visual category, people often find it easier to accept the outfit combinations shown on those bodies.
Social identity and beauty
Since I stopped working a conventional office job, I rarely bother with my hair before going out. I often wait until it gets long enough to tie up and then change the style all at once. But when I used to work at a major company, even if my mind had not fully woken up, I still had to fix my hair, put on formal clothes, and squeeze into the subway.
I have to admit that back then, my sense of self was tilted much more toward an externally maintained persona. As a project lead, a polished appearance was one of the labels I insisted on carrying.
The contrast between those two phases became so obvious that every time my parents saw me, they would suggest I should get a regular job again, because my appearance gave off what they saw as a strong sense of decline. But honestly, my mental health in this supposedly disheveled phase is far better than it was when I looked respectable on the outside.
And yet this relaxed state can still feel socially out of place. Once, my wife and I got lost in the Tokyo subway. Around us, office workers in suits moved through the transit hub like perfectly synchronized gears, precise and self-contained. The two of us, dressed in a way that clearly marked us as tourists, felt impossible to integrate into that system. But on weekends, many of those same Japanese office workers switch into bright, stylish, carefully chosen clothes that sharply contrast with their weekday appearance.
Their workday presentation is part of a social label. It reflects what they believe their social identity requires—perhaps even dictates.
Values and beauty
The deepest layer of subjectivity is not style in the shallow sense, but values.
Go back to clothing again: do people really know what they need to wear?
Take an extreme example. Steve Jobs famously kept a wardrobe of black turtlenecks and jeans. For him, minimalism reduced the amount of energy spent on clothing, freeing attention for what mattered more to him. The clothing choice was an extension of a value system, not a fashion trick. When someone imitates that outfit without sharing the value behind it, they are only copying a symbol.
That leads to a useful question: if someone pursues their own idea of beauty to the extreme, do they still need outside recognition for it?
The core of aesthetics: what kind of life is worth living?
There was once a man so uncompromising in his pursuit of beauty that people around him saw him as mad, pathological, even worthless. Only later were his works recognized as classics. In an era when academic art favored polished surfaces and realistic appearances, his bold colors, rough brushwork, and seemingly irrational treatment of reality were widely condemned.
That man was Vincent van Gogh.
From a contemporary perspective, his work is canonical. Of course, some people may also treat “understanding Van Gogh” as a social label in itself, and praise his art partly to align themselves with that label. But in his own time, many critics dismissed his work as technically deficient, even as the product of mental instability. Although he created roughly two thousand works during his lifetime, he reportedly sold only one or two of them while alive, and for very little money.
He was stubborn to the point of madness, but he persisted in his own understanding of beauty with almost no validating feedback from the outside. The imagined version of himself that might have depended on recognition had almost nothing to feed on, yet he continued.
How many people today carry that kind of inner insistence?
And how many can hold onto it under criticism, rejection, and denial?
The reason not to be dragged around by the socially imagined self is that the core of subjectivity is stable enough to resist it. That core governs something far more abstract than surface identity.
You can sum it up as “who am I,” but that phrase is almost too simple. Unlike social labels—you carry a luxury bag, for instance, and use it to signal taste or wealth—this inner layer requires a much more objective knowledge of yourself.
Return to the earlier example of the 168 cm person looking at clothes modeled on a 185 cm body. A stable inner core allows that person to recognize, quite soberly, why the outfit looks good in that context and what problems may appear when it meets their own physical reality.
At the center of subjectivity are three major components:
- deep self-knowledge
- core values
- non-negotiable convictions
At this depth, aesthetics becomes something much more abstract than taste. It turns into a judgment about what kind of life is worth living.
That judgment may be utilitarian. It may place spirit above material comfort. It may do the opposite. The answer depends entirely on one’s values. Steve Jobs chose his simple uniform because it satisfied his own judgment about how life and attention should be organized—not because of what others thought about it.
There is another feature of aesthetics at this inner level: exclusivity.
The deeper an aesthetic standard is rooted, the more resistant it becomes. If someone lives mainly in the outer layer of the imagined self, a casual insult like “you look ugly” may be enough to shake them. But to overturn someone’s core aesthetic worldview, you would have to attack all three inner components one by one.
The reverse is also true. A person whose aesthetics comes from the core often struggles to persuade others. It is hard to explain “who you are” to someone who does not care. Most people are still more preoccupied with questions like “how do others see me?” or “who do I want them to think I am?”
A rough outline looks like this:
<table> <thead> <tr> <th>Layer</th> <th>How it is attacked</th> <th>How it is formed or sought</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Deep self-knowledge</td> <td>Prove the self-understanding is false: you do not really know yourself</td> <td>A search for the ideal form of the self</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Core values</td> <td>Deny the value system: utility is inferior to spiritual pursuit, or the reverse</td> <td>Deliberately building a clear worldview</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Non-negotiable convictions</td> <td>Challenge whether the conviction is real: are you actually living by it?</td> <td>Persistence, which is often lonely</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>So where does this inner structure come from?
Why aesthetics begins at home
Family does not determine everything, but it is often where the earliest structure of subjectivity is formed.
What we call upbringing is not just moral discipline or etiquette. It includes the cultivation of character, cultural literacy, emotional and physical habits. More than that, the family transmits an entire model of the world: social expectations, economic assumptions, behavioral norms, cultural exposure. Aesthetic judgment is passed along inside that process.
When I was a child, I felt proud wearing sweaters my mother had knitted for me in all kinds of patterns. Compared with store-bought designs, they may not have looked conventionally polished, but I knew I was wearing something no one else in the world had. Because of that, the link between handcraft and beauty became part of my inner framework. To me, handmade things carry intention and affection in a way mass-produced goods often do not. For a long time, that was also why I kept the habit of writing New Year cards by hand.
When people say someone “has no upbringing,” they are usually talking about behavior. But behavior happens after cognition. Before the action, there is already an inner judgment: I do not think there is anything wrong with this. That cognition itself is often part of what family education shaped.
Here are three layers where that influence tends to show up:
<table> <thead> <tr> <th>Level</th> <th>Aesthetic expression</th> <th>How upbringing works there</th> <th>Example</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Environment</td> <td>Living space, clothing, daily objects</td> <td>Learning through observation: growing up in a designed environment creates a basic way of seeing the world through things</td> <td>As a child I was invited to help fold socks, so even now I still find it satisfying to roll and flip them neatly into shape</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Perception</td> <td>Interests and taste in music, literature, painting, film</td> <td>Cultural exposure: whether the home provides books, conversation, and ways of understanding the world beyond family itself</td> <td>I used to secretly read the novels my mother left by her bed, and I had access to a computer early, which gave me a strong interest in writing</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Behavior</td> <td>Attitudes toward food, time, and public conduct</td> <td>Practical modeling: children imitate adults, and this is often where later attitudes toward eating, punctuality, and public shame are formed</td> <td>I learned early when to stop pushing for more, because I knew demanding special treatment in public would not be rewarded</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>So yes, upbringing deeply affects aesthetics. But it also raises several important questions.
- Is the aesthetic shaped by family a reproduction of class, or an independent choice?
- Does genuine aesthetic freedom mean being able to appreciate different kinds of beauty without being limited by family bias? Conversely, can upbringing also suppress a child’s interest in certain forms of culture?
- When family education produces certain behavioral patterns, are those patterns signs of discipline and respect, or merely tools for pleasing others, adapting socially, and keeping distance?
This is the part that needs emphasis: aesthetic sense may begin in upbringing, but it is not reducible to upbringing. Later influences matter even more. Subjectivity can also be rebuilt after the fact, though doing so often costs much more pain.
Still, many people retain aesthetic assumptions inherited from family life without ever examining them. Their attitude toward food, their sense of time, their shame or shamelessness in public, all of these may feel “normal” simply because they were absorbed so early that they became invisible. What begins as education hardens into mental inertia.
Common later-life paths tend to look something like this:
- mistaking the imagined self for the real self
- a collapse of subjectivity, followed by living entirely as a social self sustained by relationships, so that inner reconstruction can be avoided
- rebuilding the inner core
That larger question can wait.
For now, one point remains important: aesthetics has no absolute standard, so there is no final court that can declare one person’s taste right and another’s wrong.
When people sort beauty into categories like taste, originality, artistic intelligence, or fashion sensitivity, what they are often responding to is not beauty itself but the labels attached to it.
At bottom, many of those judgments mean something like this: I want to be seen as a person with taste.