Would you buy a beautiful watch, its movement hand finished down to the most hidden details, the proportions perfect, the mechanism engineered with great care, if no one in the world could ever see it on your wrist? Ask yourself that, calmly. It isn’t rhetorical. The answer says more about real luxury than a hundred pages of marketing.

There’s one thing I put up with less and less, and one thing I discover more and more. I put up with less and less the ignoramus who mistakes price for quality, and the boorish rich man who mistakes a logo for good taste. They aren’t the same attitude, however much the two characters resemble each other. One looks at an object and sees the price on the tag. The other looks at the same object and sees the brand name on the tag. Beauty, on the other hand, you learn to recognise by observing things patiently, not in a classroom or from books. It takes time and experience.

The official story about luxury, it must be said, plays right into the hands of my two characters. It revolves almost entirely around two functions. Indulging yourself. But mostly, telling others something about yourself, or rather, shouting it. Jean Noël Kapferer, one of the few academics who has studied luxury seriously, has long distinguished a personal dimension from a social dimension in the value of a luxury product. Guess which of the two fills social media profiles and restaurant tables today, where people order the most expensive bottle purely to show it off to their guests or the table next door. Certainly not the personal one.

The trouble, for our boorish rich man, is that comparing yourself to others never satisfies. Epicurus knew this already, the most misunderstood philosopher of pleasure in history (hardly a glutton: he lived on bread, water and a bit of cheese, nothing like a yacht). Epicurus distinguished natural desires, the ones that arise from a real need and can be satisfied, from vain desires, fed only by other people’s opinions and the need to outdo someone else. Our boorish rich man, being rich, has already satisfied his real needs, but being boorish, lives almost entirely on vain ones, and his life resembles a race with no finish line. He buys the bigger watch. Then the longer yacht. Then the house with more rooms than he’ll ever need. Every time he’s convinced this is the one that will finally settle things for good. It never is. All it takes is for someone to moor a boat a metre longer than his in the same harbour, and he’s back to square one. Bet whatever you like: it will never be enough for him.

Real pleasure, the kind that needs no audience, comes from somewhere else. William Morris said as much in 1880, in a lecture given in Birmingham: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. Try picturing the look on our boorish rich man’s face in front of that sentence. He’d probably ask how much it costs to be beautiful, convinced it must be some kind of subscription service.

Before Morris, John Ruskin had already worked out why. In The Stones of Venice he wrote that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life: the tiny imprecision in a hand carved stone reveals a real person behind the object, not a machine. Our ignorant friend, faced with that imprecision, would only say: it’s faulty, I want a discount.

There’s a word I use on purpose in this piece: beautiful. Not ‘I like it’. They’re two different things, however casually most people confuse them. ‘I like it’ is a reflex: it says something about me, it arrives instantly, and it asks nobody’s agreement. ‘It’s beautiful’ is a judgement: it too comes from a feeling, but it requires that anyone looking closely reach the same conclusion. The trouble with our boorish rich man is that, in truth, he doesn’t even like the thing itself. He doesn’t understand what that would mean. He just likes you seeing him say he likes it.

Kant had already worked this out neatly, two centuries ago, without personally knowing anyone who owned a yacht. And even before him, Hume had noticed that some judgements of taste are more reliable than others: the judgements of those with practice, experience, an eye trained by comparison. Beauty can be taught. ‘I like it’ cannot.

I didn’t learn this from books. I spend hours, when I can, looking at things that are well made: a hand stitched jacket, the page of an old book, an inlaid door, a well proportioned building. At first you just look. Then, over time, the eye starts to see what used to escape it: one seam cleaner than another, a proportion that finally works, a detail left deliberately imperfect. No one taught me this in a classroom. I learned it by looking, calmly, without hurrying.

This isn’t just armchair philosophy, fortunately. A study published in 2015 in the Journal of Marketing, by Christoph Fuchs, Martin Schreier and Stijn van Osselaer, measured it. Consumers are willing to pay 17% more on average, up to 25% for those with a higher willingness to spend, for a product presented as handmade rather than machine made. The reason, the authors write, is that a handmade object seems to symbolically contain the affection of whoever made it. It isn’t a vague impression. It’s data, gathered in a laboratory, not by an influencer paid to say so.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who spent years studying which household objects people truly love, found something similar. The objects people treasure most are rarely the most expensive or the most showy. Oddly enough, none of the people he interviewed ever mentioned the gold plated pen holder they got as a Christmas present from a supplier. So no, real luxury isn’t only about indulging yourself and telling others something about who you are, however much our boorish rich man would like to convince you otherwise, quite possibly while showing you the receipt. There’s a third component, quieter, and to my mind more important, that marketing doesn’t talk about because it doesn’t sell in thirty seconds: the pure pleasure of having something beautiful nearby, well made, something that would hold up to scrutiny even if no one, ever, saw it. I discover a little more of it every day, just by looking. Go back to the opening question. If the answer is yes, you know what real luxury is. If instead the first thing you thought was who among your acquaintances might see that watch on your wrist, well, you’ve just understood