What is aesthetic attraction?
For me, it’s admiring someone’s beauty. This can be their physical features, most commonly their face or head, but also any other body parts, even their reproductive outer organs. Or it could be the way someone dresses, the way they embody their own aesthetic, like trying out a different hairstyle.
If one’s aesthetically attracted to a hairstyle, then you could be aesthetically attracted to anyone wearing that hairstyle. But most often it’s because that person chose this style for themselves, and that choice is what makes up their aesthetic – and their aesthetic simply works so damn well with their body, that I can’t help but look!
“But isn’t that basically sexual attraction?”
Imagine a museum. You’re in the aisle of renaissance artworks and there are so many great paintings, but only a particular painting made you stand still. Made you want to look at it forever. Perhaps it’s the colors used, or maybe the brush technique, or the artstyle, or just everything at once. Whatever it is, you can’t stop looking, you can’t walk away. You just love the beauty of it!
You might even want to steal the artwork and hang it on your bedroom wall so you can stare at it all the time. Maybe you’ll find yourself looking it up on the internet, even printing a small copy and putting it in your wallet so you have it with you. It may calm yourself down looking at it, like other people have portraits of their kids/partners in their wallets. It might be a sense of home, of safety, of comfort or else. Or you’re simply happy that you’ve seen it at least once in your life.
It can totally turn into sexual, sensual or other physical attraction types involving touch, but doesn’t have to and rarely does.
Most allosexuals and/or -romantics think this feeling goes hand in hand with sexual/romantic attraction, but it totally is its own attraction. I can find someone beautiful without interacting with them – just looking at them or their picture is enough. I don’t masturbate to their picture either, I simply admire their face/body as if it’s a painting.
Similar to watching a sunset.
Anyone who has admired a sunset before, knows aesthetic attraction. If you didn’t want to have sex with (or touch) the sunset, then you know aesthetic and physical attraction doesn’t have to intertwine. If you didn’t want to be in a romantic/platonic/friendly/familial relationship with the sunset, then you also know that aesthetic attraction can go separate from emotional attractions.
And that’s the same with aesthetic attraction towards people.
If you still don’t get the concept of aesthetic attraction, you might be nonaesthetic. (It doesn’t mean that you don’t have an aesthetic or get the idea of aesthetics, it’s just that you don’t get the attraction type.)
If you’re fine with someone being aesthetically attracted to you but looking at you as if you’re an artwork, repulses you, you might be meroaesthetic. (Although someone might actually carry your picture in their wallet because of your beauty, and you’ll never know.)
If some stranger tells you you’re beautiful, without them wanting to date you or engage with you in any other way, they might have an aesthetic crush on you, also called swish or thete.
Greyaesthetic is when one feels aesthetic attraction but not as intensely, and maybe only to 1 or 2 individuals in their lifetime. If the aesthetic attraction goes hand in hand with other attraction types, and might be tight to their greyro identity, meaning, they only feel romance towards 1-2 people in their life, the identity may be called greyroaesthetic.
And so on with other orientations.