Beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness compared

Aesthetically pleasing objects and performances from different domains and of different kinds are often equally labelled as “beautiful”. Yet what exactly does the hypothetically shared quality of “beauty” mean in these fairly different cases? To lend the notion of beauty more precise contours, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics compared it with three other aesthetically evaluative categories which in everyday language are used as specific varieties of the beautiful: “elegant”, “graceful”, and “sexy”.