:: COMPARE ::
The short answer
Beauty is one possible verdict; aesthetics is the whole apparatus of sensory judgement that produces verdicts. Baumgarten set beauty as his discipline's aim, but what he named was a science of sensory knowledge as such — and the field that grew out of it takes the ugly, the sublime and the merely vivid as seriously as the beautiful.
Side by side
| Aspect | Aesthetic | Beauty |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | All sensory judgement | One verdict |
| Includes the ugly | Yes | No |
| Countable | Yes | Yes too — 'a beauty' |
| Named in | 1735 | Ancient |
What each one means
Relating to beauty, or pleasing in appearance — and, as a noun, either the philosophical discipline of sensory knowledge founded in 1735 or a particular conception of beauty. That last sense is long established (the Bauhaus aesthetic); the internet broadened it into today's countable noun for a coherent visual identity.
Full definition of Aesthetic →The contrast above sets out how Beauty differs from Aesthetic on the points that actually matter.