The aim of the article is to reproduce and compare the peculiarities of the ethnocultural image of a vain person, as verbalized in Ukrainian and Polish phraseology. The subject of analysis is the structural‐semantic and functional peculiarities of Ukrainian and Polish phraseological units, in which vanity is conceptualized as an emotional state of superiority, arrogance, pride, and which have a pronounced negative connotation. The study found that in the common Ukrainian‐Polish perception, a vain person is a person who considers himself/herself superior to others, and, accordingly, others negatively evaluate this position. Most often, vanity in Polish and Ukrainian phraseology is conceptualized through the image of a person with their head raised high, puffed up, with protruding lips, whose appearance and habits resemble the behaviour of a beautiful pompous bird: a peacock or a rooster (in Ukrainian and Polish ethnoculture), a crane or a turkey (only in Polish), goldeneye or a screech‐owl (only in Ukrainian). Also common is the idea of a vain person who thinks he/she is the smartest, while others think that something is wrong with him/her. Comparing the analyzed phraseological units in the selected languages allows us to better understand the peculiarities of the image, which became the impetus for the creation of the phraseological nomination, to establish the regularities and mechanisms of the verbal explication of vanity in Ukrainian and Polish linguistic cultures.