Lipstick Lesbian/Playing With
Basic Trope: A lesbian character who sports an attractive-to-straight-men appearance, typically pairing with another.
- Straight (not in THAT way): Alice and Betty have faces ripped from a fashion-magazine.
- Exaggerated: Lesbians are the only feminine women in the world.
- Lipstick lesbians are portrayed as even more attractive than straight women, because Girl-On-Girl Is Hot.
- Justified: Alice likes the style.
- Alice lives in a country where lesbianism is persecuted and has to at least appear straight to avoid imprisonment.
- Inverted: Butch Lesbian or Manly Gay
- Subverted: Betty ditches the makeup as soon as she's escaped a social event.
- Double Subverted: ...because she didn't like said event. She then puts it on again.
- Parodied: Alice reads the magazine tips on "how to impress your man!".
- Alice reads men's magazine tips on "how to impress women!"
- Deconstructed: Alice and Betty are deeply closeted, because the deceptively sleepy little town where they live would turn nasty if anyone found out that they were a couple.
- Reconstructed: Alice thinks the butch angle is stereotypical and played-out, deciding she can still be gay and feminine.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Betty are glammed up the first time we see them...at a formal event. In the next episode, they're in flannel and hiking boots...for a camping trip in the mountains. Neither style turns out to be typical of either; Alice usually looks like a stereotypical Granola Girl, while Betty is a Perky Goth.
- Averted: Neither Alice nor Betty is a lesbian.
- Alice is The Ladette, whether or not she is a lesbian.
- Alice is neither particularly masculine nor feminine.
- Enforced: They've signed a bombshell actress for the part.
- The writer wishes to provides Fan Service, and believes that Girl-On-Girl Is Hot as long as the girls look pretty.
- The writer wishes to avoid Unfortunate Implications or stereotypes associated with typical depictions of the Butch Lesbian, instead going to the other extreme.
- Lampshaded: "Well, excuse me for liking to look pretty!"
- Invoked: Alice and Betty, usually Chapstick Lesbians, decide to glam it up for a Halloween party.
- Defied: "I am a strong proud modern woman and I am not going to turn myself into a Barbie doll clone for any reason, but especially not so I can facilitate your masturbatory fantasies about me and my girlfriend!"
- Discussed: "Why can't any of the lesbians we know be all Rita Hayworth smoking hot instead of always wearing flannel?" "... why am I friends with you?"
- Conversed: "I have to wonder if the writers designed Alice and Betty to be ultra-feminine as Fan Service or as a legitimate attempt to avoid the Butch Lesbian stereotype."
- Played For Laughs: In-universe, wearing makeup and dresses is masculine, while having short hair and playing football is feminine. Everyone treats them like Butch Lesbians.
- Played For Drama: Alice's desires to conform and be 'normal' conflict with her 'alternative' sexuality, causing her much angst.
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