Vanity, like fashion, is a harsh mistress. Beauty fades with time after all, but then there are times that it's taken away before time even has a chance to. Whether because of an accident, curse or illness this character loses their extreme good looks and becomes ugly as sin.
Which is rather appropriate, considering that since Beauty Equals Goodness most characters who suffer this will do a Face–Heel Turn, or if already a villain constitutes a Freudian Excuse for even worse villainy to "get back at the world" that did this to them/mocks them. Of course if this happens to a Big Man on Campus or an Alpha Bitch — or simply a physically attractive Butt-Monkey — it may all be played for comedy and be undone by episode's end.
This is named for the fable of "Beauty and the Beast", and since then this trope is closely associated with the Aesop of the vain losing their beauty for boasting of it, and only getting it back if they become humble.
Often leads to a "My face! My beautiful face!" moment, should the villain be a large enough ham. Expect them to go and break every mirror they come across.
Compare the more extensive and Laser-Guided Karma related Karmic Transformation, or even more generally, Forced Transformation. See also Broken Angel, What Have I Become? and Emergency Transformation. Contrast Gorgeous Gorgon. Very likely to happen to the Vain Sorceress, since it's her worst fear. If this is self-inflicted, then it's Tarnishing Their Own Beauty. If it happens to a villain, there's overlap with Evil Makes You Ugly.
Also related to I Just Want to Be Beautiful as the most likely reaction to losing beauty. See also Power-Upgrading Deformation for a silver lining to this fall from grace. Almost always involves Bemoaning the New Body.
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Anime & Manga
- Assassination Classroom: As revealed in his backstory, Koro-Sensei was quite the Bishōnen. Dangerous antimatter experiments ended up turning him into the cartoonish octopus creature he is today.
- In Berserk, Griffith's good looks are absolutely ruined by torture, and this, along with the other horrors he suffered during that hellish year would lead to him betraying the Hawks he once led in a truly malignant Face–Heel Turn to become the fifth member of the God Hand.
- Claymore
- The Claymore warriors definitely seem pretty, but let's not forget the whole Awakening thing.
- Nor the fact that the incisions necessary to infuse Youma flesh into human bodies to make Claymores leave scars bad enough (not shown for quite a while in the manga, never in the anime) that, in her back story, Teresa used them to eliminate any ideas a gang of bandits had about raping her. They don't look bad for the first few seconds, until you realize that there is a deep and permanent incision where guts and blood can spill out, that starts at her chest and connects to her vagina.
- In Devilman: The Birth when the demon spirits start entering people's bodies after Ryo spills their blood, among them we see two attractive women turn into ugly demons.
- Glass Mask. The reclusive actress Tsukikage Chigusa was forced into early retirement when a lamp lighter fell during a stage accident and burned half of her face off. When she's shown in the series as an old woman after her accident, her face is always half-covered by her hair, thus ensuring that the audience never actually sees her scars every episode.
- In an episode of the rather obscure anime Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid, the sea witch Hedwig got ahold of a bottle of the potion that Prince Justin regularly used to allow him to breathe underwater, adding a drop of another potion that also changed him into a monster after he drank it. Appropriately, the episode was entitled "Beauty and the Beast". His true love, Marina (the "little mermaid" of the title) later kissed him to change him back.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dartz' backstory from when he was King of Atlantis reveals that his wife was a beautiful queen. Then came the Orichalcos, and she transformed into a savage beast.
Comic Books
- Batman:
- Harvey Dent's transformation into Two Face.
- Arkham Asylum: Living Hell: Warren White used to be a vain and corrupt playboy billionaire and is fairly easy on the eyes. After being locked up in Mr. Freeze's chamber, he loses his hair, nose and lips to frostbite, cementing his transformation into the Great White Shark.
- Fantastic Four:
- Depending on the Artist, Ben Grimm was anywhere from average to ruggedly handsome in looks to start with. Now he... is not.
- Doctor Doom was once a handsome man until an explosion disfigured Doom into a hideous shape, forcing him to be forever hidden behind a steel mask.
- Some versions play this trope straight with Doom, others have him as only suffering a small scar (which he considers horrible because he's such a narcissist). Yet other versions expand on the small scar by having Doom make it worse in an attempt to cover the scar. Still other versions suggest that the physical aspects of the small scar didn't bother him in the least, and that he was instead tormented by the fact that the scar was received at the hands of Satan analogue Mephisto, who filled Doom's head with the sound of his tortured mother's screams at night via said scar, and making him actually horribly burn his face on purpose later (see below), just so he didn't have to hear it anymore. A completely ruined face was a fair exchange for peace of mind. When Doom's mask was created for him, he pressed it to his face while it was still scorching hot from the forge fire. Needless to say, if Doom's face hadn't been badly scarred before, it certainly was after that. As Doom is a powerful sorcerer, a supremely skilled scientist, and the ruler of his own country he regularly fixes his face yet something always happens to mess his face up again. It's led Ben Grimm to accuse him of subconsciously wanting to be ugly so that he has a flaw to focus on instead of paying attention to how much he's messed up his own life.
- Sharon Ventura, the second Ms. Marvel, got hit by this twice: the first time by accident, the second as Doctor Doom's revenge for her betrayal.
- Iron Man: Tony Stark, after being badly injured by his own land mine in Vietghanistan. His chest was torn open by the shrapnel badly enough that some of it lodged in his heart — obviously, damage that severe scarred his chest badly. He gained another scar (though a far less noticeable one) after his open-heart surgery later in the comics. Whether or not Marvel's artists would actually acknowledge the scars that would come from such physical trauma seemed to change depending on who was drawing the run at the time.
- Justice League of America: In the Elseworlds story Justice, Wonder Woman is scratched by claws laced with a poison which scars her face. In short time, the scar begins to grow and disfigure her as it returns her back to the mound of clay she was made from. By the end of the story, she has little to no hair left on her head, and her entire skin looks like charcoal and burning embers.
- The Punisher: Billy Russo was originally nicknamed "The Beaut", but after the Punisher introduced him face-first to a glass pane, he now goes by the name Jigsaw. Granted Russo was already a murderous mobster when the Punisher met him, but as Jigsaw he's gone completely Ax-Crazy.
- Superman: In Action Comics #243, "The Lady and the Lion", Superman rebuffs Circe, who doses him with a serum that turns him into a humanoid lion. Supes spends the entire story angsting about it, despite the efforts of his friends at the Planet to cheer him up.
- Transformers: Robots in Disguise: Ratbat was shown in flashbacks to have been a tall and powerful-looking Cybertronian before the Great War broke out, when he was a high-ranking member of the Senate. Megatron's forces caught him and he was turned into the small, weak robot bat he is in the present day. And also went from being a powerful politician to being forced to serve Soundwave as a minion.
- Watchmen: Although already pretty much a Psycho for Hire, when the Comedian's face is slashed open in a bar during the war in Vietnam by a pregnant Vietnamese woman, he reacts by pulling out a gun and shooting her in her very visibly-swollen belly. And the child she was carrying? Was his. The gash on his face, made with a broken glass bottle, scarred horribly.
- Wonder Woman: In Wonder Woman (1987), the White Magician turns himself and his horrified ally Cassie Arnold into hideous monsters in his quest to destroy Wonder Woman. He does not succeed, though he does kill her friend Artemis and manages to disgust Circe enough that the witch actually helps Diana take him down.
Comic Strips
- Dick Tracy: Tulza Tuzon used to be movie star handsome. In 1943, he was working as a commercial truck driver. On one trip, he was transporting dangerous chemicals when the truck crashed. Tuzon was knocked unconscious and left with half of his face submerged in the chemicals. By the time he was treated, the left side of his face was severely damaged, and his hair had been blanched. He first became a circus freak, and then a criminal under the name Haf-and-Haf.
Fan Works
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): One of Alan Jonah's mercs acknowledges that Vivienne Graham was quite attractive when she was human. After she's reborn with San fused to her, their first hybridized form basically looks like a giant-sized version of the wendigo from Until Dawn with sunken eyes, a malformed second head on Vivienne's back and bony protrusions.
- This is used in the first Comatose volume, which is a Beauty and the Beast (1991) Fan Vid set to Skillet's "Comatose". However, it's an inversion on the original film's usage of this trope. Adam and Belle are Happily Married newlyweds when Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (1959) curses Adam into a beastly form. The drama now comes from the couple having to learn to live with this huge change.
- King Explosion Murder the Shield Hero: In chapter 18, Princess Malty/Myne fights against her former teammate Rino which eventually leads to a close struggle in which Myne attempts to permanently scar Rino for leaving a big cut across her face, but when the princess attempts to blast fire into Rino's face, the latter dodges just in time and the attack backfires on Myne, burning off half of her face in the process. Afterwards, Myne attempts to hide her disfiguration by covering it with her long hair. But then the next chapter, her punishment for her crimes against the Crown and the Shield Hero consisted of, among other things, getting her hair permanently shaved off, leaving her bald and with a burn scar. After being overthrown once she usurps the crown, she gets a face full of explosion rendering her whole face burnt.
- In Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover, two ex-Cerberus characters discuss this trope with an Alliance soldier who happens upon them. One even has her pre-enlistment headshot—a marked difference from her current Cyborg form. Her friend even comments on how "cliche" the transformation is. Before, idealistic (presumably attractive) young woman who wanted to defend humanity when no one else would. After, a hideous abomination with sunken Electronic Eyes, Death Seeker tendencies, and bloody cybernetics sticking out of places since (working for) Evil Makes You Ugly without OSHA compliance.
Film — Animation
- Beauty and the Beast (1991): The Tragic Backstory of the titular Beast, as explained in the Cold Open: he was once a handsome but cruel and vain prince, who, after rudely turning away an Angel Unaware, was cursed to take the form of a fierce beast.
- Shrek: Princess Fiona is a beautiful maiden who is cursed to transform into an ogress every night from sundown to sunup. At the end of the film, she chooses to become an ogress permanently so that she can be with her true love Shrek. She's okay with it, as she was never comfortable in her Princess Classic persona anyway.
- An interesting variation appears all the way back in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in that the Evil Queen initially does this to herself willingly with a potion. It was supposed to be as a temporary disguise, but she ends up dying in that form when the Dwarfs chase her off a cliff for poisoning Snow White before she can transform back, playing up the irony as the entire reason the Queen wanted Snow White dead was to regain her status as "Fairest in the Land".
Film — Live Action
- Art the Clown inflicts absolutely brutal carnage on everybody he meets, with beautiful women often presented as getting the worst of it. Most of them, however, are lucky to simply die quickly after Art gets his hands on them. Two of them are not.
- In All Hallows' Eve, the third segment ends with the heroine Strapped to an Operating Table after Art had cut off not only her limbs but also her breasts, all while laughing at her misery.
- Terrifier opens with a TV interview with the lone survivor of a rampage by Art whose ordeal had left her with a badly mangled and scarred Nightmare Face, with her nose, lips, and left eye gone and her right eye missing its eyelid so it's always open and bloodshot. The ending reveals that she was the film's Final Girl Victoria Hayes, whose face Art had partially eaten before he was put down by the police. While the show's host Monica Brown tries to be polite, afterwards when she's backstage she makes multiple disparaging remarks about her appearance and expresses her horror at it, which causes Victoria to attack her and leave her with a similarly disfigured face. Terrifier 2 reveals that she was thrown in an insane asylum for this, where she winds up possessed by the Little Pale Girl and, as of Terrifier 3, joining Art as the other half of a Big Bad Duumvirate. When she (or rather, the Little Pale Girl possessing her) sees herself in a mirror in 3, she remarks about how hot she used to be, and how nobody would want her now.
- In Blood Red Sky, it's shown in flashbacks that Nadja was a fairly attractive woman when she was human. Then she got bitten by a vampire, and in the universe of this film, vampires Look Like Orlok. By the start of the film, her infection has already caused her hair to fall out, forcing her to wear a wig. Her transformation speeds up considerably after she gets shot and then loses access to the medicine that stalls her infection, and by the end, the other passengers aboard the plane are reacting to her with horror as she turns increasingly inhuman.
- In Deadpool (2016), Wade Wilson was played by an appealingly muscular Ryan Reynolds. After he contracted terminal cancer, volunteered for an experimental program as a last-ditch attempt to cure it, and was subjected to horrifying mad science torture in an attempt to give him superpowers, Wade lost his boyish good looks and most of his sanity, becoming a bald, Covered with Scars Cloud Cuckoolander.
- In the Evil Dead series, becoming a Deadite usually entails a grotesque physical transformation that makes the victim look downright demonic, no matter how attractive they were before. They get better if they're freed from their possession, though. Army of Darkness has Ash outright quip about it when Sheila, now a Deadite, goes to taunt him.
Sheila: You found me beautiful once.
Ash: Honey, you got real ugly. - This is the fate of the Alpha Bitches Bridget and Heather in The Final, after the villains torture them by smearing flesh-eating chemicals on their faces. It's revealed at the end that Bridget was the disfigured girl seen in the restaurant in the opening, hiding her appearance behind her hair and a hoodie.
- Cleopatra in Freaks is a vain, beautiful acrobat who only married the dwarf Hans for his money and then tried to kill him so she could claim it all for herself and then run off with her true love, the circus strongman Hercules. When Hans finds out, he and the other circus "freaks" proceed to subject her to a Karmic Transformation as revenge, turning her into a "human duck" with her legs cut off, the flesh on her hands melted and deformed to look like duck feet, her torso permanently tarred and feathered, and her tongue cut out so she can no longer speak, only squawk. The original ending (deleted from the Bowdlerised theatrical cut) reveals that Hercules was also castrated and made the circus' castrato singer.
- Laura in Friend Request is the most gorgeous and popular girl in her school, but the spirit of a tormented classmate gradually deprives her of her looks, leaving her disfigured and ugly.
- The vampire strippers in From Dusk Till Dawn develop hairless, reptilian appearances after they put on their Game Faces, much to the horror of the customers at the Titty Twister.
- In The Grudge 2 series, the popular school beauties of the International High School, Vanessa and Miyuki, are transformed into horrifying ghosts by the Grudge curse. Vanessa also loses her beauty while she is still alive.
- In The Hunger (and the novel it was based on), a human who is turned by vampire Miriam will maintain their good looks for several centuries, so long as he/she feeds once a week. What happens when those centuries are up? Rapid Aging, as her current lover John learns. John is played by David Bowie, and the scenes that document his aging, aging, aging into decrepit hideousness are regarded as a triumph of special effects makeup work even today.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master: Debbie Stevens is a sexy, tomboyish, and athletic girl whose death scene begins with some Workout Fanservice as she's lifting weights, only for Freddy Krueger to use his Reality Warper powers to subject her to graphic Body Horror, turning her into a giant humanoid cockroach before squashing her like a bug.
- Erik (Claude Rains) in Phantom of the Opera (1943) had him starting out looking normal and then disfigured afterward, in that case by a vitriol-throwing — probably that plot-device came by way of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1935 — remade in The '50s as House of Wax (1953) (which is probably another example)). Other adaptations of the novel that disfigure their Erik-equivalents include the 1962 film, Phantom of the Paradise, a 1983 TV movie, and the 1989 film, but in the book and other adaptations he's deformed from birth.
- In Oz the Great and Powerful:
- The beautiful Theodora is manipulated by Evanora into eating a cursed apple, crushing her love and compassion and turning her into the future Wicked Witch of the West.
- The equally beautiful Evanora becomes a hideous hag after Glinda destroys her magical necklace.
- Revenge of the Sith: The handsome Darth Vader ends up getting hideously burnt to a crisp on the lava-planet Mustafar, which results in him having to wear his trademark black armored life-support suit for the rest of his life.
- In Saw X, Cecilia is a tall, beautiful older blonde woman who survives the Death Trap she's thrown into, but is left with a nasty chemical burn on her right cheek, with it being implied (going by the damage it did to Parker's skin) that the Deadly Gas she was attacked with did the same to the rest of her body.note
- Small Soldiers has a comedic non-human example with Christy's collection of Gwendy dolls, a plain-faced parody of Barbie. Much like their inspiration, they are fashion dolls designed to look beautiful and glamorous, with some of the Commando Elite even ogling them before Chip Hazard tells them to cut it out, since their real purpose is to be turned into soldiers to replenish the Commando Elite's ranks using the chip from Nick Nitro's skull. The kicker: once they're brought to life, they still speak in Valley Girl accents and slang, even after they've been shaved bald and some of them have been visibly damaged and mutilated from the process.
- Much of the Body Horror and Fan Disservice in The Substance is rooted in this trope.
- The film's protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle is a 50-year-old former actress turned aerobics instructor who, despite suffering body image issues due to the ageism and absurd beauty standards of the entertainment industry, is still clearly a beautiful woman. Said body image issues cause her to take the titular Substance in an effort to reclaim her youth and beauty, creating a younger, idealized version of herself who she calls Sue, letting her go back to her glory days as a glamorous celebrity as "Sue" takes Elisabeth's job. However, there are rules that must be followed for users of the Substance to keep doing it safely, rules that Elisabeth breaks because she wants to spend more time in her sexier Sue body rather than go back to being an older woman with a dying career. As a result, her normal body starts to rapidly age and deteriorate, turning her into a grotesque, hunchbacked hag.
- Later in the film, after Elisabeth and Sue are separated into two people, Sue kills Elisabeth upon realizing that Elisabeth had tried to kill her. Unfortunately, Sue needed Elisabeth alive in order to extract from her body the stabilizer (implied to be spinal fluid) that she needed to keep her body from falling apart... which is exactly what happens when Sue is preparing to host the New Year's Eve special, where her teeth fall out, her fingernails break off, and one of her ears falls off. This causes her to rush home and take the rest of the Activator she had saved in order to create another "better version" of herself, even though the Activator was clearly labeled as something that could only be used once with the remainder to be thrown away after. And thus is born Monstro Elisasue, a horrifying fusion of Elisabeth and Sue that resembles a massive, vaguely humanoid mass of flesh. The kicker? Elisasue still tries to go back to the New Year's Eve special, wearing Sue's dress and earrings, causing the audience watching to react in slack-jawed horror.
- "Baby" Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. She freaks out when she happens to glance in the mirror when she's reliving her child star career and sees her ravaged, sagging, horribly made-up face staring back at her.
- When Evil Calls:
- Victoria is a beautiful and popular student. Jealous of her gorgeous looks, the homely Jane wishes she was prettier than Victoria. Jane's wish is granted and Victoria is horribly disfigured in a lab accident that destroys her beauty and leaves her face a horrifying mess.
- The stunning and well-endowed Carol wishes she was older after her teacher, Mr. Dale, rebuffs her attempt at seduction. She soon ages so rapidly that most of her skin rots away and her face becomes a living skeleton.
Literature
- In the modern "Beauty and the Beast" adaptation Beastly, the Jerk Jock is cursed by a witch to become a beast because he's so shallow and self-centered that all anyone likes him for are his looks. The film adaptation tried to do this, but most critics felt that he merely became Hollywood Homely instead. He still gets to keep his six-pack abs, and he looks more like a hardcore punk kid than anything else. Some viewers (including
Gabe and Tycho) even felt that he was more attractive and badass-looking in his "beast" form than he was in "pretty-boy" mode.
- Tanith Lee's short story "The Beast" is a "Beauty and the Beast" retelling that inverts a lot of the fairytale's traditional tropes: instead of Vessavion starting the story as an ugly Beast who becomes handsome at the end when the Beauty returns to him and recognizes his inner beauty, he starts the story as a handsome and seemingly perfect man who becomes an ugly Beast (and dead) at the end when his wife Isobel leaves him after learning about his secret hobby of murdering ugly people and taking their incongruously beautiful body parts for his collection.
- The Belgariad has Silk's mother, a former beauty who was badly scarred by a plague. It's described as so tragic — for Silk and his father — that Silk spent 20 years out of the country and breaks down crying after seeing her, and his aunt describes it as a mercy that the plague also left her blind so she couldn't see what had become of her face. Something of a Broken Aesop, given that Silk is a genius who occasionally lampshades that he's stuck with the Face of a Thug.
- In The Case of Lady Sannox by Arthur Conan Doyle, the titular Lady Sannox is the most beautiful woman in London and having an affair with Douglas Stone, a greedy and unscrupulous surgeon. Stone is tricked into cutting off her lip by her vengeful husband, and her beauty is destroyed. Lady Sannox spends the rest of her life as a hideous recluse.
- In Dangerous Liaisons, Marquise de Merteuil ends the book being cast out from high society and afterwards losing her considerable beauty to smallpox. Several of the film adaptations of the book leave this trope out.
- In Duckling Ugly, Cara uses her powers gained from her stay in De Leon to change the beautiful-but-brainless Alpha Bitch Marisol into a grotesque monstrosity.
- In one of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, a beautiful witch curses her victim by giving him the hideous face of a demon. At the end of the story, he regains his rightful appearance, and she... well, guess.
"M...O...N...S...T...E...R!"
- Fight Club:
- This is Bob Paulson's backstory. He used to be a bodybuilder who took great pride in his hypermasculine physique, and even developed a chest-expansion program that was marketed on late-night television. However, he achieved his physique by using steroids, which ultimately came at a price in the form of testicular cancer. Losing his balls led to hormonal changes that not only robbed him of his muscles but also caused him to undergo a very different kind of chest expansion in the form of large breasts (or, as the Narrator calls them, "bitch tits"), on top of losing his family and his wealth.
- "Angel Face" got his nickname because he was a Pretty Boy before he joined the fight club. His initiation sees the Narrator give him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with the specific intention of destroying his good looks and leaving his face badly scarred, with the Narrator saying afterwards that he wanted to destroy something beautiful.
- In the Final Destination novel Looks Could Kill, the Villain Protagonist Sherry Pulaski is a beautiful model who has a premonition of the yacht she's about to board sinking, killing everybody on board. As such, she manages to save herself and several other people, but her face winds up horrifically maimed by a piece of debris from the disaster. With her modeling career over and her former friends treating her like a pariah, Sherry tries to kill herself, only for Death (who, in the Final Destination series, is an actual sentient force seeking to balance its books) to offer her a deal: help it kill all the people she saved in the disaster, and in turn, it will repair her face and restore her beauty.
- In The First Law, Glokta is this with a side of Being Tortured Makes You Evil (for a given value of evil; as this series goes, he's one of the least bad guys). He was originally a good-looking up-and-coming officer until he was captured by the Gurkish. Among other things, he was subjected to Eye Scream and The Tooth Hurts, which had obvious effects on his face.
- In Stuart McBride's Halfhead, beautiful Serial Killer Fiona Westfield was subjected to the titular state-designated punishment, going from a deceptively young and innocent-looking blonde to a shaven-headed, lobotomized wreck with no breasts, no orifices, no lips, no cheeks, no tongue, and no lower jaw. When she recovers her mind six years after the lobotomy, she immediately begins using Applied Phlebotinum to get her looks- and her ability to manipulate children into killing- back.
- Harry Potter :
- The stylishly handsome Bill Weasley has his face clawed by a werewolf, leaving permanent extensive scars. Once his family learns that his personality will be intact, they secretly hope that his ruined looks will drive off his fiancée Fleur, whom everyone but Bill can't stand. Upon hearing a suggestion of doing this from Molly Weasley, Fleur denies that the thought even crossed her mind, declaring that she is more than pretty enough for the both of them. After this, the Weasley family starts to warm up to her.
- Voldemort was originally very good-looking, but his dark magic and his curse backfiring on him when he tried to kill Harry Potter corrupted him into a snakelike creature. This doesn't seem to bother him since he just wants to live forever anyway.
- In The Hunger Games, Glimmer is the stunningly beautiful tribute from District 1. Her beauty is destroyed and her face is horribly disfigured by trackerjack stings.
- In "My Life In Black And White", by Natasha Friend, Lexi has always been defined by her stunning beauty. She takes great pride in her looks and relishes the attention and popularity her beauty has afforded her. While she is still a nice and charming person, she has become very vain and self-obsessesed, is a bit of a jerk. However, her face becomes completely ruined as the result of a car accident. Lexi becomes permanently disfigured and her old beauty will never come back. She must come to terms with the loss of her beauty and who she is without her good looks.
- In The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh, Princess Margaret is turned into a dragon (the eponymous "laidly worm") by her Wicked Stepmother. Her brother Wynd manages to undo the curse, and returns the favor by turning the wicked queen's magic against her with a branch of rowan-wood, causing her to turn into a toad.
- My Dearest Darkest: Kyra is a haughty Beta Bitch who, when making her first deal with Nerosi, asks for beauty, and becomes the most beautiful and charismatic girl in school. However, her final gift has her asking Nerosi for power, and with that, she's turned into a Humanoid Abomination with a mass of Combat Tentacles growing out of her chest and the rest of her appearance turning grotesque and rotten. Oddly, she doesn't seem to mind. When Finch and Selena see what she's become, she tells them that, while beauty had its advantages, she'd rather be powerful and intimidating.
- The Princess Bride:
- The first part of "Chapter One: the Bride" is about the most beautiful women in the world, and how they all lost their looks. (One lost her figure to chocolate; one survived smallpox, even if her skin did not; and one worried so much about whether she was "perfect" that she prematurely aged herself.)
- "To the pain" is an example as well; it disfigures someone's body and face, leaving them with their ears perfectly intact to hear how repulsed everyone is by their appearance. Westley threatens to do this to Humperdinck, though it never happens.
- In The Star-Child by Oscar Wilde, the titular child is very beautiful but ill-mannered; and when he turns away a beggar woman claiming to be his mother, he suddenly turns ugly. He searches in vain for his mother, and remains ugly until he gives a beggar man three pieces of gold, and the beggar man is his father. Soon after this, he finds his mother.
Live-Action TV
- This is the fate of Stormfront at the end of season two of The Boys (2019). As the season's Big Bad, she had been a sexy, punkish Dark Action Girl in a Spy Catsuit played by the beautiful Aya Cash, but she does not go down beautifully, and when she's defeated, she's missing her right hand, her left eye, and both of her legs while her face has been burned almost beyond recognition. When we see her again at the start of season three, most of her hair is gone, her scalp and half of her face are covered in burn scars, and she's confined to a hospital bed looking like a terminal cancer patient. Between that and how her plans to build a Fourth Reich were destroyed, it's no wonder she kills herself.
- Cassandra of Doctor Who is a camp comical character, but she is also a bit of a tragic example of this. In her extravagant efforts to preserve her beauty and also to remain a "pure human" (while other humans had long since mingled with aliens, producing hybrids), she has turned herself into quite a freak. By the time she's introduced, she's literally a stretched out sheet of skin with a face on it, requiring frequent moisturization to survive. The Doctor, to punish her, lets her dry out at the end of her first appearance.
- Dracula (2020): Lucy Westenra is reimagined as a beautiful, flirtatious Hard-Drinking Party Girl who becomes a vampire so that she can remain beautiful forever. Unfortunately for her, her family has her "dead" body cremated, which leaves her covered head-to-toe in fourth-degree burn scars. At first, she still thinks she's the sexy young woman she was in life, including seeing herself as such in the mirror, but when confronted by a photograph of her hideously disfigured form, she freaks out and begs Jack to Mercy Kill her.
- Fallout (2024): Before World War III, Cooper Howard was a handsome Hollywood actor who played rugged leading men in Westerns. Afterwards, radiation exposure turned him into a ghoul, the Fallout universe's Nuclear Mutant version of zombies, with a decrepit appearance that includes his nose having fallen off, his hair having fallen out, and his skin having turned aged and leathery sometime in the last two hundred years. At one point, he sits down to watch one of his old movies and mourns for what he's become. Fortunately, he did get some nice perks out of the deal, and he spent those two hundred years becoming an actual gunslinger like the characters he once played. He also looks a damn sight better than most of the ghouls in the franchise, who simply resemble rotting corpses.note
- Pixelface: In "The Ugly Truth", a magical beauty cream transforms Alexia into a yeti.
- In Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996), Sabrina's cousin feels Sabrina is becoming too vain, and turns her handsome boyfriend Harvey into a beast-man to teach her a lesson. At first Sabrina is horrified, but after spending time with Harvey she realizes that she still likes him for who he is. Lesson learned, her cousin restores his good looks.
- The Walking Dead (2010): The "bicycle girl" zombie seen in the pilot episode is revealed in the webisode "Torn Apart" to have been a fairly attractive woman named Hannah before she was zombified. As the webisode's title indicates, she met her end by getting Devoured by the Horde, leaving her so badly mutilated that it's difficult to even determine her gender from looking at what's left of her.
Myth and Folklore
- Older Than Feudalism: Very common in Classical Mythology. If a parent's boasting about their daughter's good looks didn't get them sacrificed to the nearest sea-god, then the girl herself, saying she was lovelier than the goddesses, would find herself transformed into a horrible monster of some sort. Meet Medusa. This also had an uncanny tendency to happen to any woman whom Zeus found to be more sexually attractive than his wife Hera.
- A number of The Search for the Lost Husband fairy tales all involve a prince cursed into some animal form and forced to live like that for a set period of time. Circumstances lead to the protagonist, a young girl or princess, marrying him as a beast. Inevitably, the girl (or sometimes her mother) learns of his actual form and breaks a prohibition that forces him to stay cursed and/or leave her forever, but the girl undertakes a long and difficult journey to fetch him and restore his true form.
- There's an old legend of a beautiful young lady who, instead of helping her family with the daily chores, spent all of her time by a pool of water, brushing her hair and admiring her beautiful reflection. One day, a single hair from her head disturbs the serene surface of the pool, releasing a water nymph. The nymph, angry at the woman for her vain and shallow ways (and possibly jealous of the woman's beauty), cursed her, changing her into an enormous, man-eating dragon, cursed to devour anyone who came near, until a knight appeared who was brave enough to remain unafraid of her, and pure enough to find her beautiful. The story ends on a downer note, as it's never said whether or not such a knight ever finds her.
- In Arthurian Legend, Gawain is compelled to marry an incredibly ugly woman, Regnelle, as her reward for saving Arthur's life. On their wedding night, she surprises him by turning into a beautiful woman and explaining that she's under a curse to turn ugly during the day. Now that she's married, however, Gawain can choose to switch it so that she's beautiful during the day and ugly at night if he wants. He asks what she'd prefer, thus passing the Secret Test of Character to break the curse and make her beautiful all the time.
Tabletop Games
- In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Nosferatu are a clan of vampires whose most iconic characteristic is that they Look Like Orlok. Many of them specifically go out of their way to turn vain, beautiful people into Nosferatu in order to Break the Haughty, with such people being known as Cleopatras (after the villain from the movie Freaks, due to her Fate Worse than Death). Thanks to their horror at their deformation, one of the first abilities that many Cleopatras learn is the Obfuscate ability Mask of a Thousand Faces, which allows them to disguise themselves as other people.
Theatre
- In Damn Yankees, Lola was once the ugliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island, before Applegate turned her into a vamp. He punishes her for rebelling against him by changing her back temporarily.
- Into the Woods: In the Witch's backstory, her mother cursed her with extreme ugliness for losing magic beans from the Baker's father, who was stealing them to satisfy his pregnant wife's cravings.
Toys
- In BIONICLE, the narcissistic Toa Matau considers himself to be this trope after his transformation into a Toa Hordika.
Video Games
- Amnesia: The Bunker: The Beast is a misshapen brute with pitch-black eyes, dangerously sharp claws, and a gaping mouth with torn cheeks. Pre-mutation, he was Augustin Lambert, a bespectacled Pretty Boy.
- If you run out of lives and get a Game Over in Banjo-Kazooie, then the Wicked Witch Gruntilda succeeds in her plot to steal Tooty's beauty. Just to rub it in the player's face that they failed, they get a cutscene in which Gruntilda is transformed into a Hot Witch (visually based on Posh Spice) and Tooty into a hideous gonk.
- BioShock: The Splicer known as Baby Jane is still attractive despite her disheveled looks, but she loses it by the second game due to continuous splicing.
- Chariot: When the player is close to defeating the Gemini twins, they warp from being a pair of pretty angels into a pair of zombies with rotting flesh and missing eyes coated in ugly vines.
- City of Heroes:
- One of the Vahzilok arcs deals with an Eidolon, which in this game are the most humanoid of the reanimated corpses Dr. Vahzilok creates, who tries to regain her former human beauty.
- In one of the Devoured Earth arcs, a woman named Tanya Tyler is transformed into a hideous monstrosity named "Terra".
- Clive Barker's Jericho: In life, Hanne Lichthammer, the leader of the Geheimnisvoll Abwehrmacht expedition that the Nazis sent to the lost city of Al-Khali, is described as having been a tall, slim, blonde-haired, blue-eyed paragon of Aryan beauty, albeit one with a sadistic streak a mile wide. After her transformation by the Firstborn, she now looks as monstrous on the outside as she is on the inside, with her left eye missing and much of her skin (including her lips, her scalp, and her upper torso) having been flayed off. The low-cut, form-fitting leather outfit she wears over her still-curvaceous figure pushes it straight into Fan Disservice and makes her look almost like a Cenobite — which was likely intentional, given that the story was written by Clive Barker, the creator of Hellraiser whose stories are often filled with this sort of mix of sexuality and horror.
- Quelaag and her Sister in Dark Souls went from being beautiful women to being beautiful women with horrible demonic lava-spider lower bodies.
- In Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp the evil wizard Mordroc puts a magic ring on the beautiful Princess Daphne's finger which turns her into a giant ugly horned, pig-snouted, purple-skinned, wart-covered monster, she is changed back when Dirk removes the ring and places it on Mordroc which kills him.
- In The Game of the Ages, you rescue a group that's under a curse that mutates their looks and leaves them mentally retarded. Just asking about them earns you some indignation from townsfolk, who turn out to be relatives.
- Medusa cites this as her motivation for trying to attack Skyworld in Kid Icarus: Uprising, but Palutena quickly counters this excuse, saying she just changed Medusa's appearance to match her dark heart for her actions.
- JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island, anyone? Look at Tiffany, the princess girl. She now looks like a warthog!
- League of Legends
- Cassiopeia was once a beautiful noble's daughter who seduced other men in order to gather secrets for her father. This proves her undoing when one of these lovers makes her take a vow of secrecy upon a serpentine blade...turning her into a monstrous lamia after she betrays his secrets.
- Soraka's original lore had her acquire her present half-unicorn form as a cosmic punishment for using her celestial magic for revenge against the chemist Warwick. Her Celestial Soraka skin depicts her glamorous form before she was cursed. This later got retconned to her always being half horse when her lore was completely rewritten.
- Primal: Player character Jen is a pretty Perky Goth woman. Over the course of the story, she gets four Voluntary Shapeshifting forms drawn from the sapient races of Nexus, all of which are very monstrous-looking.
- In Rise of Nightmares, the people who get mutilated and turned into grotesque monsters by the Big Bad include a number of beautiful women, often in such a way as to highlight their destroyed beauty. Sacha and Tacha, a pair of ballerina twins, get turned into creepy zombie ballerinas, the skimpy costumes they've been given contrasting sharply with their new Femme Fatalons and their clammy, gray, dead skin. Monica, a flirtatious party girl, has been turned into a puppet and had her left arm and leg and lower torso crudely replaced with bronze parts while her remaining human parts are visibly zombie-like — all while still wearing the tattered remnants of the sexy club outfit she was wearing before.
- In the 2012 Twisted Metal reboot, the model Krista Sparks thought that this had happened to her after her face was mangled in a car crash. In truth, after her reconstructive surgery the only sign of the damage was a small scar, but in her mind, that got blown up into a grotesque Nightmare Face, leading her to kill her plastic surgeon, start wearing a mask (implied to have been created by Calypso) to cover up her "imperfection," and enter the Twisted Metal tournament so that she could become "beautiful" again.
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines adapts the Cleopatras from the aforementioned tabletop game with two of the Nosferatu vampires the player encounters. Imalia used to be a supermodel and is extremely bitter about her lost beauty, and her sire, Gary Golden, was a former icon of The Golden Age of Hollywood.
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive: Vlad inverts this. While ostensibly able to shapeshift, doing so proved nearly lethal the one time he did, permanently locking him into a hideous bat/bird hybrid form. When he's forcibly shapeshifted into a woman, it results in a Heel–Face Turn (though, granted, the fact that his evil supervillain brother bit the dust at about the same had a lot to do with it).
- Implied in Nixvir Chapter IV, where the tailor, who appears very ugly, rants about having been cursed and about how he's managed to get used to it. We receive very little information on this because Oriel interrupts him and demands he make the dress for Erik.
Web Original
- In the short horror film Kalley's Last Review, the titular Kalley, a pretty young beauty vlogger, does a sponsored review of a chemical peel from a startup skincare company. The product gives her severe chemical burns, leaving her face a bloody, scab-covered mess, but Kalley refuses to seek medical help, insisting on seeing it through to the end—even after the company drops the sponsorship for fear of bad publicity. In the end, the peel strips her face down to the muscle, leaving her horribly disfigured. It also turns out the skincare company never existed: Kalley invented it, and the sponsorship story, and applied 100% trichloroacetic acid to her face—all in the hope that her sad tale of disfigurement would go viral. Her final subscriber count is eight.
- Looming Gaia: Melusine, monsters created by the divine Haggomah, seek out beautiful people and trick them into kissing them. Contact with melusine saliva causes Haggomah's Blight, a disease that turns its afflicted progressively uglier. Haggomah created melusine as a revenge for how she has been bullied for her ugliness.
- The handsome but scrawny Bruno of the Neopets Tale of Woe plot is offered a potion by a mysterious stranger with the promise that it will make his dreams come true. In the hopes of becoming stronger to impress the girl he loves, he drinks it, only to be transformed into a hulking, grotesque monster.
Western Animation
- Aladdin: The Series : In "Eye of the Beholder" Jasmine takes some magic lotion in an attempt to be more beautiful for Aladdin. It instead slowly transforms her into a human-snake hybrid.
- Batman: The Animated Series: Calender Girl was a model who turned thirty and is alleged to have had a nasty facial scarring beneath her mask. However, she's still quite beautiful, but her obsession has rendered her unable to see anything but the flaws. It crosses over with Gorgeous Gorgon, since she's actually not ugly under the mask.
- Frequently Played for Laughs on Celebrity Deathmatch, where the whole premise revolves around The Beautiful Elite of movies, music, and pop culture fighting to the death and often killing each other in Bloody Hilarious fashion.
- The fight between supermodel Cindy Crawford and comedian Janeane Garofalo doesn't see them kill each other, but instead make a pact: if Crawford loses, she has to gain fifty pounds, and if Garofalo loses, she has to lose fifty pounds. They both knock each other out, ending the fight in a draw with both of them declared the losers, and the last we see of Crawford is her gorging herself on burgers and packing on the pounds.
- The fight between Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio sees Nicholson bash DiCaprio's face against the turnbuckle until it's been completely smashed in, with his eyes hanging out of their sockets. Somehow, DiCaprio survivesnote , and when his fangirls see what Nicholson did to their Pretty Boy idol, a riot breaks out in the Deathmatch arena.
- The fight between Melissa Joan Hart and Alyssa Milano starts out as pure fanservice, with the hosts Johnny Gomez and Nick Diamond stating that it was to see who was the sexiest witch on TV. Hart, the star of Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996), is in a red bikini, while Milano, one of the stars of Charmed (1998), is in a low-cut black leather tank top and pants. Unfortunately for them both, the fight involves the two of them using actual magic on one another, and instead of the "sexiest hexing ever" as Nick promises, the fight sees the two of them turn each other into hideous hags who resemble stereotypical Wicked Witches, all while still clad in their sexy outfits.
Nick: They started out as two lovely young ladies, and now, they're... well, they're just plain hideous!
- The fight between Scott Stapp and Eddie Vedder has Stapp mocking Vedder's flabby gut while flaunting his own muscular physique, as if to say that he's the superior Alternative Rock frontman. Vedder gets his revenge by grabbing Stapp and grinding his abs against the salt-coated barbed wire serving as the ring's ropes for the fight, destroying them.
- Ever After High: Happens to prince Daring Charming in the Epic Winter movie. It's played for laughs as he's a vain (not quite heartless) Jerk Jock, and he has to learn a lesson about not being so vain. It's undone by movie's end, but tellingly it had to be undone with a kiss, and it wasn't from his intended fiancé.
- Family Guy: Peter gets addicted to becoming more beautiful through plastic surgery. Eventually, he crashes his car and after suffering numerous scarring injuries, lands in a lard vat and drinks all the lard. This ends with him looking exactly as he always does.
- Rocko's Modern Life: Ed Bighead was once known as "The Handsomest Man in O-Town" before an accident involving Heffer, a newspaper, and a giant blender.
- Scooby-Doo:
- In the first episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, Daphne is turned into a werewolf, surprisingly her werewolf form isn't particularly pretty or feminine looking, instead looks like a long-eared, long-snouted, gray-furred Taz the Tasmanian devil, Flim Flam was able to change her back with his Lotsa Luck Joy Juice.
- In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Simone and Lena have sold their souls to a cat god to give themselves immortality and to get revenge on the pirates who killed their friends and families. They become werecats and have to keep feeding on the souls of people who then become zombies. During their initial transformation they're still rather attractive and feminine looking, but during the second stage they're much more beastly, feral, and scary looking.
- The Simpsons:
- Played for comedy on an episode where Krusty the Clown temporarily loses Sideshow Mel as the co-host of his children's TV show and hires actor Luke Perry, who is his half-brother (don't think about it too much), as a replacement. In a big all-star special edition of the show intended to boost ratings, Krusty fires Luke out of a cannon that sends him shooting all the way across town. He crashes into the Kwik-E-Mart and smashes right through several dozen jars of battery acid; we don't see what happens to him immediately afterward, but we hear him screaming, "AAAH! MY FACE! MY VALUABLE FACE!" Interestingly, the next time we see him, the acid scarring has completely healed.
- Moe gets plastic surgery to look attractive, but then later a wall falls on him and his face goes back to what it was before. Once Moe points out how it doesn't make any sense, the episode ends.
- On two occasions in Super Friends, the beautiful Wonder Woman is turned into an ugly beast, the first was in "The Incredible Space Circus" in which she is turned into a fanged and clawed bipedal rhinoceros monster, and in "The Island of the Dinosoids" she is turned into a dinosaur woman.
- Star Wars: Clone Wars has a strange "Beast to Beastlier" example: a tribe of the natives of Nelvaan have their males abducted by the Techno Union, whose experiments mutate them from slender wolfmen to giant, bloated ogre-like monstrosities; to add injury to injury, they all have their right arms removed and replaced with cyborg ones. Anakin rescues them, but the change is permanent. Happily, after a moment of nervous shock, their families warmly accept them back.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): In one episode, April O'Neil gets mutated into a fish woman while in another she gets turned into a wasp woman. Both times, the turtles and April are horrified about how hideous she now looks. A third episode saw her mutated into a feline, though her appearance was not commented on that time. Of course by the end of the episode she is transformed back every time.
- Willo the Wisp (1981): The Prince is turned from a handsome prince into a shaggy Cousin It-like form in the first episode. While there are some attempts to change him back, Status Quo Is God from there on in.
- Winx Club:
- In season three, this happens to Stella twice—once when Countess Cassandra turns her into a green, fishlike monster, and then later, when obtaining the Water Stars necessitates a Sentimental Sacrifice from each of those pursuing it, Stella's is her face, leaving her with Black Bead Eyes. While neither was a punishment for being vain, Stella is the the most image-conscious of the girls, which in the case of the Water Stars is why that was what she had to sacrifice. neither is permanent.
- Also in season three, when the Ancestral witches get fed up with Valtor's failure, they transform him from an attractive wizard to a hulking, horned monster with shades of Big Red Devil. The Trix are so disgusted with this that they completely abandon him. While the Ancestresses hope that this new form will be more effective in fighting the Winx, this is also a punishment for his failures.