1: Who do we talk about?-/a beautiful woman/ a pretty girl / a gorgeous girl / a handsome man
You can see a few differences immediately. First, the word "handsome" usually describes men instead of women. Next, "beautiful" fits best with "woman" instead of "girl". So you can see that the word "beautiful" is a little more sophisticated.
2: What do we talk about?
Now let's see what objects these words usually describe:
a beautiful dress, beautiful flowers, beautiful scenery
gorgeous hair, a gorgeous dress, a gorgeous beach
a pretty face, a pretty picture, a pretty dress
handsome features,/ a handsome profit
Some interesting things to notice here: all of the "female" words can be used to describe a dress. So you can tell that there is overlap between the words. In a lot of situations, you have more than one choice.
You can see that both "pretty" and "handsome" describe someone's face. But we use "features" to talk about a man's face instead of the word "face".
"Beautiful" and "gorgeous" describe parts of nature. But "beautiful" is more common when talking about something small like a flower, while "gorgeous" fits better with something large like a beach.
Finally, isn't it funny that a common use of "handsome" is related to money? A "handsome" profit means a large amount of profit.
3: Adjectives are often used along with an adverb. Let's look at what adverbs fit well with "beautiful", "pretty", "gorgeous", and "handsome":
incredibly beautiful, stunningly beautiful
conventionally pretty, exceptionally pretty
absolutely gorgeous, drop-dead gorgeous
strikingly handsome, ruggedly handsome
Here, we see a lot of differences. Each word has a different set of adverbs that it fits with.Many of these adverbs just mean "very": "incredibly", "stunningly", "exceptionally", "absolutely", "drop-dead", and "strikingly" all emphasize how good-looking something is.
The phrase "conventionally pretty" means pretty in an ordinary and not very exciting way.
A "ruggedly handsome" man is handsome in a kind of rough-looking way.
4: We can also look at what other adjectives are often used together with "beautiful", "pretty", "gorgeous", and "handsome":
beautiful and elegant, beautiful and talented
smart and pretty, pretty/sexy
beautiful and gorgeous, tall and gorgeous
tall and handsome, handsome-young