mystique

plural mystiques

1. uncountableusuallyAn aura of heightened interest, meaning or mystery surrounding a person or thing.

   THE LONDON BRIGHTON & SOUTH COAST RAILWAY. By C. Hamilton Ellis. Ian Allan. 30s. [...] In an opening chapter entitled "Portrait", he ends by asking whether there was a mystique about the L.B. & S.C.

   1960 December, “New reading on railways”, in Trains Illustrated, page 776

   3 more examples

   The mystique spelled out a choice—love, home, children, or other goals and purposes in life. […] The baby boom of the immediate postwar years took place in every country. But it was not permeated, in most other countries, with the mystique of feminine fulfillment.

   1963, Betty Friedan, “The Mistaken Choice”, in The Feminine Mystique

   Through male bonding, the subculture of the hunt caught up in the mystique of the chase, the hunting party became a military force, and men discovered that they need not stop at defense: they could go out to hunt for other people's wealth.

   1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 134

   Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain’s cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation.

   2007 October 21, Adam Hochschild, “Voyage of the Damned”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 28 Aug 2017