Beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness compared

PLoS One. 2019 Jun 21;14(6):e0218728. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218728. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Age Factors
  • Beauty*
  • Cohort Studies
  • Culture
  • Esthetics* / psychology
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Perception / physiology
  • Semantics
  • Sexuality* / psychology
  • Social Desirability
  • Social Values
  • Surveys and Questionnaires
  • Terminology as Topic
  • Virtues*
  • Word Association Tests
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.