A beautifully designed bar of soap from Lisbon, Portugal had a lot to teach me about life under dictatorship.

From the 1920s to the 1970s, the fascist regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar suppressed free expression, leading artists to pour their creative energies into what they could, including the politically acceptable decorative arts. For me, this bar of soap from Claus Porto - it's gorgeous, and you should buy one - is a symbol of how beauty and artistic distraction repackage themselves to survive oppression, and of how societies before us have leaned into decorative art when nothing else was acceptable. Let’s keep leaning into beauty, but let’s also be conscious of when we begin reshaping beauty to avoid offense, because it can be a symptom of deep national trouble.

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