With Beirut's growth in the second half of the nineteenth century into a leading port city on the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, the consumption habits of its inhabitants changed. In addition to trends and commodities reaching it from places such as Damascus and Aleppo, it was subjected to an influx of cheap, mass-produced goods from the industrialized countries of Europe. The press was soon replete with articles admonishing the widespread focus on appearances among the middling classes of the city and criticizing their obsession with novelty. Consecutive French consular trade reports giving advice to potential French exporters echo these sentiments, describing prevalent tastes as “garish”, “showy”, and “loud”. In trying to understand what these tastes involved, this paper looks at a layer of labor that both catered to and contributed to constructing new tastes in Beirut. Mass-produced commodities competed with local and regional products, which they often copied. Local and regional artisans and manufacturers attempted to survive the onslaught of cheap imports by adapting their products both to imported styles and to imported materials. In doing so, they not only responded to a growing fascination with certain popular items, but also offered hybridized goods that ready-made commodities could not compete with. Although such manufactured articles may have appeared grotesque to some, they managed to successfully compete with mass-produced commodities and to carve out a local taste niche. I argue that this taste niche not only helped local manufacture to survive, it also catered to the need of a growing group of consumers to partake of the myth of social mobility that Beirut had to offer.