Are Beautiful And Attractive The Same?
And Are Pretty, Cute, Beautiful And Gorgeous The Same?
Introduction
‘Beautiful’ and ‘attractive’ are used as synonyms not just by AI tools that can’t tell the difference, but also by humans who should know better.
So, why do they do this? For a clue, consider that it’s usually young people who suffer from this misconception. Why?
It’s likely that this is due to social programming by show business and the fashion industry.
Why do they do that? Because it’s safer to cast beautiful people as leads and use them as models.
People would be more likely to pay for products that let them identify with good looking people.
This makes young viewers think that only good looking people are worth aspiring for even though this isn’t true like Johnny Depp’s severed finger found out the hard way about Amber Heard. This makes them confuse beauty with attraction, which are two different things.
Nowadays, there’s the reverse trend of casting bad looking people as leads and using them as models but this impacts the aesthetics and the audience’s experience. I’m not sure what’s the solution.
The Reality
The reality is beauty and attraction are two different things. What’s the difference?
Beauty is about looking aesthetic. Technically, it’s defined as having a symmetric face and body while attraction is the ability to draw people to you and engage them emotionally.
Is beauty attractive? This depends on age. Younger people tend to find all beautiful people attractive.
Older people have more experience and would have accumulated a lot of turn-offs about the gender they like such as arrogance, ignorance, lack of sophistication etc.
This makes them find some beautiful people unattractive. Are there other ways to be attractive? Yes, personality is a great way to be attractive. It’s arguably even more important than being good looking.
Other ways are to be proficient at something, to be a good person, being sophisticated, to dress well etc.
A Different World View
What does this mean for the way we see the world? From a one-dimensional world, where we have desirable people and undesirable people, we have a richer world.
Now, almost everybody can be desirable for at least somebody, creating a much more positive world.
How? From one category of desirable people, we have more. We now have multiple categories:
Beautiful and attractive people (the girl in the first picture above)
Beautiful but not attractive (picture below)
Not beautiful but attractive (picture below)
Not beautiful and not attractive
Of these categories, the first and third are good options to pursue as we find the people belonging to these categories attractive, which means good chemistry and happiness.
If we need to compromise, we might choose someone from the second category, but I wouldn’t recommend it as the relationship might not be fulfilling if there’s no mutual attraction.
The fourth category is the worst case scenario, whose members are chosen by partners under the desperate maxim ‘something is better than nothing’.
Grades Of Beautiful
A similar concept is lumping all adjectives describing beauty under one category and treating them as synonyms.
Again, this is done not just by AI but by people too. Words such as pretty, cute, beautiful and gorgeous are treated as the same.
How can this be when they sound so disparate? I treat the words the way they sound to me.
Pretty is the bare minimum looks someone has to have to not be bad looking. Cute is something more which makes the person endearing.
Beautiful is still better and gorgeous is close to perfection.
Conclusion
I think it would be a better world if people used words such as attractive, beautiful, cute, pretty and gorgeous in a way that accurately describes how someone looks.
I hope this idea appeals to others and more people start using these words the way I have suggested.
If you liked this, you might like my books.