Sophisticated vs. Elegant — What's the Difference?

Having or showing much worldly knowledge or cultural refinement

Characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style.

Very complex or complicated

Characterised by or exhibiting elegance.

Suitable for or appealing to the tastes of sophisticates

Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision.

Of a person: having obtained worldly experience, and lacking naiveté; cosmopolitan, worldly-wise.

Fine; doing well.

Of art or other things: appealing to the tastes of an intellectual or sophisticated (sense 1) person; cerebral; also, cultured, elegant, refined.

Very choice, and hence, pleasing to good taste; characterized by grace, propriety, and refinement, and the absence of every thing offensive; exciting admiration and approbation by symmetry, completeness, freedom from blemish, and the like; graceful; tasteful and highly attractive; as, elegant manners; elegant style of composition; an elegant speaker; an elegant structure.

Complicated, especially of complex technology.

Exercising a nice choice; discriminating beauty or sensitive to beauty; as, elegant taste.

(obsolete)

Refined and tasteful in appearance or behavior or style;

Mixed with a foreign or inferior substance; not genuine or pure; adulterated, impure.

Suggesting taste, ease, and wealth

Of a thing: having its meaning changed in a deceptive or misleading way.

Of seemingly effortless beauty in form or proportion

Simple past tense and past participle of sophisticate

Refined or imposing in manner or appearance; befitting a royal court;

Having or appealing to those having worldly knowledge and refinement and savoir faire;

Ahead in development; complex or intricate;

Marked by wide-ranging knowledge and appreciation of many parts of the world arising from urban life and wide travel;

Intellectually appealing;