Beauty is the ascription of a property or characteristic to a person, object, animal, place or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, culture, social psychology and sociology.
Because it can be a subjective experience, it is often said that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Often, given the observation that empirical observations of things that are considered beautiful often align among groups in consensus, beauty has been stated to have levels of objectivity and partial subjectivity which are not fully subjective in their aesthetic judgement. Ugliness is the opposite of beauty.
The word "beauty" is often used as a countable noun to describe a beautiful woman, an excellent example of something, or a pleasing feature of something.