That most cultures celebrate aesthetics and human beauty in some manner may blind observers to the distinct ways in which socio-historically constructed spaces have come to interact with beauty and what those interactions may reveal of the particular socio-historical construction of those spaces. Over the last two decades, academic scholarship across the humanities has sought to surpass the boundaries of the nation-state that artificially harden what are in fact porous, contested, and contingent borders. Without seeking to reify the nation-state, I have recently explored in my research a putatively national subject—Filipina beauty—in order to illuminate the historical construction of the nation-state through the instrumental imagination of the Filipino national project and the role of beauty within it. In this, while rejecting culturally essentialist, timeless understandings of beauty, I also take seriously the cultural specificity and continuity of such articulations.