How do you measure beauty? You can't: "beauty" is subjective. And even if you try e.g. count the times you use recursion vs. iteration: that metric is subjective and not grounded in reality.

Sometimes recursion does allow you to reason about code more easily or come to a working solution faster, sometimes it does not.

Measure the concrete: CPU time and memory consumed. Iteration will likely trump recursive methods w.r.t both these metrics. If it doesn't, you can likely transform your iterative algorithm to one that utilizes SIMD (not always).