Responsive Beauty explores the complexities of creating abstract work that is sociopolitical in content. Michelle Murphy’s photographs feature beauty products as art materials and consider the triangular relationship between consumer culture, the beauty industry, and the wage disparity between genders. Th e resulting images reveal the capacity of cosmetics to function as both a metaphor and a consumable object. Murphy is a Chicago-based artist who has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as a photographer for NASA for more than a decade.