Beauty Is Never Tarnished/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Female characters in movies seem to avoid being physically disfigured or even getting dirtied up despite the circumstances

  • Straight Example: Bob, Alice and Charlie escape from a burning building. Bob's face is badly burned, Charlie has several deep cuts but Alice only has a little bit of soot on her clothes
  • Exaggerated: Alice and Bob's building blows up. Bob receives third degree burns, several broken bones and scarring injuries while Alice hasn't been harmed at all. In fact, her hair is still perfect
  • Justified:
    • Although Alice is in the middle of a battle, she sits on the sidelines and acts as The Medic
    • Alternatively, the other male characters try to protect her from anything dangerous
    • Alice is a total Badass Action Girl and her skills are so great that nothing can touch her.
    • Alice is Nigh Invulnerable or otherwise immune to the nasty side effects of combat.
  • Inverted: Alice and Bob have to crawl through a thicket of thorns. Alice emerges with a lot of scratches while all Bob has is his hair messed up
  • Subverted: The fire scenario again only this time Alice breaks her arm and gets cut across the face
  • Double Subverted: It skips forward to a couple of days later where Bob and Charlie still haven't recovered from their injuries but Alice looks perfectly fine
  • Parodied: Bob and Alice compete in an obstacle course that involves mud pits, sharp objects, hungry dogs and water hoses. Bob emerges muddy and bloodied with his clothes in tatters while Alice emerges looking like she just came from a spa. She then checks herself in a compact and declares "not a hair out of place".
  • Deconstructed: Alice is part of a zombie apocalypse and is able to get through attacks without any scratches...because she runs off while the others do all the fighting and hides until the zombies go away. The Hero takes her aside and says something to the effect of "In this world now, you have two choices: stay alive and be ugly or die and be pretty".
  • Reconstructed: Alice becomes a capable Action Girl and learns to protect herself properly from getting badly damaged in battle.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice's house catches fire, she cuts herself on broken glass but is unharmed when the ceiling crashes down around her. She hits her head on a door frame but doesn't have the resulting bruise. She emerges from the building with the cuts and covered in soot but without a single burn. Later on in the ER she has the cut bandaged up and looks perfectly fine
  • Averted: Alice and the boys emerge from some disaster with all the same injuries
  • Enforced: The creators don't want to be seen as misogynists so Alice never gets any real harm done to her
  • Lampshaded: "You've just been through a forest fire so why the hell do you look like you came from the beauty parlour?"
  • Invoked: Alice goes into a house fire, stating that she'll only get dirty and the guys think that's sexy anyway
  • Defied: Alice cuts herself across the face and says "girls get injured too, you know"
  • Discussed: "I'm a girl; I'm not gonna get too beaten up if I go into that burning building"
  • Conversed: "I love Alice from Fire Fighters NY and how she never even messes her hair up in those fires"
  • Played For Laughs: Alice, Bob and Charlie are on a game show to be gunged. Bob and Charlie get gunged normally but Alice's gunger malfunctions and sprays Bob and Charlie instead, leaving Alice looking fine. She bows to the crowd and the presenter remarks about how chivalrous the gunger is.
  • Played For Drama: A man breaks into Alice's house one night and cuts her face up with a piece of broken glass, leaving her horribly disfigured. Alice refuses to leave the house again because of how bad her scars are.

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