History Main / BeautyIsNeverTarnished

* Apparently invoked by the Capitol in ''Literature/TheHungerGames''. After her Games, Katniss finds that her hearing in her left ear is restored, and while she was out the Capitol apparently enhanced her appearance for the cameras -- her skin's perfection, smooth and glowing with no burns, scars or anything. Peeta, on the other hand, has his lower leg replaced with a metal and plastic device. This is true for all victors, who will go on to live in the spotlight after their bloodbath.

** A male example: The Fourth Doctor has [[UglyCute odd looks]], but possesses an almost [[VocalDissonance incongruously]] beautiful [[BadassBaritone deep]] dramatic voice that was commonly remarked upon at the time. Unwillingness to even temporarily ruin this results in a scene in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E5TheRobotsOfDeath "The Robots of Death"]] where his voice is completely unaffected by the fact that he is inhaling copious amounts of {{helium|Speech}}. He later gives a HandWave to Leela that his BizarreAlienBiology includes "a larynx that can put up with anything".

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', Luffy tends to ask non-human creatures (more specifically creatures with a lower body that's significantly different from a human) if they poop. The [[DemBones living skeleton]] Brook immediately replies that yes, he does poop. But Luffy never manages to get an affirmative answer from the beautiful mermaids as the first mermaid's reply is interrupted by Sanji who wants to invoke this trope, and the second mermaid takes offense to the question and refuses to answer.

* Naturally in Fanservice game ''VideoGame/RumbleRoses'', the girls can be whipped, kicked in the nose, and have their joints manipulated in superhuman ways but no matter how much damage they receive they never show any physical injury aside from just holding the area most damaged when damage is high, though this damaged area doesn't affect their ability to fight. A notable example is Anesthesia who shocks her opponent's bellies with a medical AED for the girls that [[BareYourMidriff have the area exposed]] and take the shock straight to the skin they do not show any damage afterwards to the area either.

* In ''Manga/{{Change 123}}'' the female fighters get badly injured, but few scars mar their perfect features. The one time they were shown/drawn was when Gettou explained [[JustifiedTrope how hers were closed up so they'd heal and fade]].

* In ''LightNovel/{{Gosick}}'', [[spoiler: Avril]] is revealed to have been kidnapped and replaced by an impostor. Despite having been tied up underneath some floorboards for ''at least'' a few days, she looks clean and has no visible signs of injury when she's discovered. What makes it even stranger is that a {{Flashback}} shows that she had to be physically overpowered by her captor after fighting back, which you think would have at least left a mark or two.

* For someone who is consistently a ButtMonkey who gets attacked often, Jessie from ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'' sure has immaculate makeup. It doesn't matter if she's having a SickEpisode or being attacked by Pokemon, her hair always bounces back without styling needed and her lipstick never smudges. In fact, the only time she's probably ever even ''shown'' without makeup was a [=XY=] VillainEpisode.

[[caption-width-right:350:Would you believe that they were in a WouldHitAGirl BrutalBrawl just moments before this?]]

In video games (especially fighting ones) in that girls and boys can [[WouldHitAGirl fight]] and both genders can take the same hits it is not uncommon for girls to have less extreme facial reactions (IE. doesn't pop out tongue, eyes don't come out of head, or general deformation such as jaws stretching out when hit under said jaw) while males tend to vary on their consequences for taking hits even if they take the same amount of damage to the HP bar.

* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'': During Wendy and Cartman's fight, even though she treated him to a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown, he [[WouldHitAGirl got in a few good punches at the beginning,]] and the most that ever happens to her is that she got a little dizzy. She comes out of the thing with only a few bruises on her, while Cartman was covered in blood and probably had half the bones in his face broken. {{Justified|Trope}} as Cartman is a BoisterousWeakling who cannot take a hit.

* ''WesternAnimation/SleepingBeauty'': Prince Phillip is a Rare Male Example. Despite being bound, gagged, blasted, zapped, lapidated, thorned, burned, and clawed, the dude comes fresh as roses and ready for a ball!

* {{Action Girl}}s and female [[PersonOfMassDestruction people of mass destruction]] are in large numbers in ''LightNovel/IsItWrongToTryToPickUpGirlsInADungeon''. Yet, with one exception, they received no disfiguring injuries. This is particularly jarring for Aiz, who has been DungeonCrawling for 10 years and known as LadyOfWar!

** Nothing ever mars Princess Leia's beauty no matter what happens to her -- captured, tortured, broken out in a shoddy rescue attempt (let's be serious, it was rather unprofessional), and to top it off, dumped in a garbage bin -- she still looked great after it all. And ''that'' was just the ''first'' movie. Of particular note was ''her hair''. Almost all of her hairstyles would be difficult -- if not impossible -- for a hairstylist to even ''create'', to say nothing of keeping them in place after all she goes through. Ironically, the most realistic one was the style she had in ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi'' while [[GoGoEnslavement Jabba's prisoner]]. (And in that case, ''the rest'' of the outfit was very unrealistic.) Parodied in ''Film/{{Spaceballs}}'':

Women and girls are action and adventure heroes -- just like men and boys are! They get into dangerous situations, face menacing villains, get captured, and even get into fights. But where death-defying stunts leave men visibly bruised and bloody, the women are oddly ''put-together''. When women tear their clothing, it's [[{{Fanservice}} that kind]] of ClothingDamage; if their hair's unkempt it's [[UnkemptBeauty artfully dishevelled]]. Cuts on the face are always perfectly placed to emphasize their cheekbones. Basically? Fierce hand-to-hand fights are cool, [[{{Catfight}} even sexy,]] but the broken noses and black eyes they cause are not. A heroine will almost never suffer a ''[[ScarsAreForever permanent]]'' injury such as the loss of a limb or eye, no matter how much punishment she goes through. Even when heroines ''die'', they'll (usually) be privileged to suffer "beautiful" deaths (IRL, [[NoDeadBodyPoops corpses occasionally shit themselves]], and this is statistically more likely in women than in men).

The other version of this trope concerns a different form of beauty: "inner" beauty -- i.e., the recognition that women have bodily functions, due to being, you know, ''human''. Gross-out jokes (and anything involving farts, burps, whatever) are male territory.

This trope is generally more prevalent (and noticeable) in visual media when you can actually see the women in question. Preserving female characters' attractiveness at all costs is most likely responsible for the prevalence of the CuteMonsterGirl and its various related tropes. Male aliens, robots, and monsters can be as outlandish as the creator desires, but ''female'' aliens, robots, and monsters inevitably look just like regular attractive women with [[LittleBitBeastly fangs, horns]], [[RubberForeheadAliens antennae]], or even just an [[GreenSkinnedSpaceBabe unusual skin]] [[AmazingTechnicolorPopulation color]]. Expect the aforementioned female non-humans to be nowhere near as ugly as [[HollywoodHomely they're depicted]] [[InformedAttractiveness as]] [[InformedDeformity being]].

This is also part of the reason that MenAreTheExpendableGender, and that female characters who ''do'' die generally get much "gentler" deaths or [[GoryDiscretionShot don't die onscreen.]] After all, you can't show a woman getting set on fire, riddled with bullets, or having her head ripped off by the monster without ruining her ''good looks'', and [[MostWritersAreMale nobody wants that]]. There is also a practical possibility for this in long-running works - characters who have particularly bad scars will get them on their back, chest or legs to save make-up artists the trouble of having to apply more prosthetics than they would if the scars were on the face.

It's more common in the West, particularly in older movies and shows -- however in Japan, the ''outer'' beauty version is often averted, with [[GenderIsNoObject people being roughed up or exposed to violence regardless of sex/gender]]; on the other hand, the ''inner'' beauty version is, if anything, much stronger. This may not protect female antagonists from [[CoveredInGunge Gunge]], or, less commonly, female villains from the [[GoodScarsEvilScars appropriate scarring]].

If beauty ''is'' tarnished and then subsequently killed off, it's DeathByDisfigurement. If she lives, it's almost always a ticket to the land of BodyHorror, via BeautyToBeast. If ''intentionally'' done by themselves, it's TarnishingTheirOwnBeauty. For a version of this that applies to beauty lost through time, see MenGetOldWomenGetReplaced. GoodThingYouCanHeal can be used as a DoubleSubversion of this trope -- beauty gets tarnished, and then quickly restored.

* Characters/{{Harley Quinn|TheCharacter}} from ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'' is frequently fighting and moving around but her make-up never smudges. Even when she wipes her face, it doesn't smudge unless she's intentionally removing it. She has been depicted in the rain with no effect. It must be rather high-quality make-up but still. The comic version of her eventually {{justified|Trope}} this in the ComicBook/{{New 52}} by having her skin permanently bleached white, much like the Joker, instead of her using a costume.

** Played with (for laughs) in the episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled." Krusty the Clown appears in a TV "comeback" special with various celebrities, one of whom is Creator/LukePerry (who is somehow Krusty's half-brother, even though they're ''at least'' a quarter-century apart in age, and whom Krusty hates for some unspecified reason). Krusty has an ImagineSpot where he spitefully daydreams about Luke getting so grievously injured by some clown slapstick that his gorgeous face is so grotesquely flattened that it actually recedes into his head. Later, when Krusty '''does''' fire Luke out of a cannon on live television, Luke goes flying through a window in the studio and all the way across town, crashing through the Kwik-E-Mart...just as Apu is setting up about two dozen jars of battery acid. Luke smashes through the display and then can be heard screaming that his face has been permanently disfigured -- but then when we see him again, he's fine. He finally lands in an abandoned building that promptly gets '''blown up''', but [[IronButtmonkey somehow manages to survive]] -- and when he shows up at the very end of the episode, [[AmusingInjuries all he has to show for the incident are some bandages]].

* Krissy Vaine claimed that in her time in the WWE developmental system -- which was just as the Diva Searches were happening and more models than ever were brought in (Krissy has said she believes the only reason she was kept on was because of her own modeling background). So all the developmental Divas felt pressured to preserve their good looks 24/7 -- which is not easy when one is getting beaten up in training. She has admitted that [[ChristmasCake at the age of 26]] she freaked out and was spending over half her monthly pay on botox.

** Seen in earlier X-Men teams, too, where the physical mutations seemed to pop up only in male characters -- [[Characters/XMenTheOriginalTeam Beast]] and [[Characters/MarvelComicsNightcrawler Nightcrawler]] are visibly abnormal, [[Characters/XMenTheOriginalTeam Angel]] has hard-to-hide wings, Characters/{{Wolverine|JamesLoganHowlett}} had claws. The only female X-Men character of that period who had a visible mutation was ComicBook/{{Polaris}}, with easily-dyed green hair (technically, [[Characters/MarvelComicsStorm Storm]]'s white hair and blue eyes are physical aspects of her mutation, but they only add to her exotic beauty). Even today, the X-Men have not had a female member who wasn't at least a CuteMonsterGirl.

* In ''Film/TheLegendOfZorro'', Catherine Zeta-Jones runs across a dirt field at full speed, fights with a shovel, runs back across the same field at full speed, falls in the dirt at least once, and when she gets back to her room her white nightgown is spotless and she doesn't have a hair out of place.

* Elizabeth Swann goes through a lot in the ''Franchise/PiratesOfTheCaribbean'' movies with only dishevelled hair and a few smudges of dirt. During the climactic battle in the third movie, Davy Jones smacks her in the jaw with his claw-arm hard enough to send her flying, and she doesn't get so much as a bruise.
* ''Film/{{The Princess|2022}}'': {{Zigzagged}}. While the Princess's face gets off easy, she does get a few nasty cuts and gets stained with blood throughout the movie.

* In ''Film/Rogue2020'', Samantha 'Sam' O'Hara (Creator/MeganFox) is a mercenary captain leading her squad on a rescue mission against a camp full of jihadists, and then being stalked by a rogue lioness. Despite being in the thick of all the fighting, she winds up far less dirty and dishevelled than her men, suffering--at most--a minor cut on her chin.

* ''VideoGame/{{Dislyte}}'': In the Ruler's Law event, [[spoiler:while Jin Yuyao shows Alexa to Abigail through her communicator, Alexa says that she's covered in bruises, has a bloodied mouth and bruised legs. Yet, her sprite only has a couple of bruises on her face (and in the fully illustrated scene in 2-6, more bruises can be seen on her body) and doesn't look too badly beat up otherwise.]]

* ''Series/{{Farscape}}'': Averted when Aeryn, the tough but usually-beautiful main love interest, is infected with Pilot's DNA and turns into a pretty disgusting slimy hybrid for an epidode.

** [[GenderInvertedTrope Gender-Inverted]] on a regular basis. The two pretty boy leads, Sam and Dean, might get beaten up regularly but it's rare to see the effects last even until the end of the episode. Dean even says at one point that coming BackFromTheDead erased all his old scars and sorted out his broken fingers. Uh, we've seen your hands, sweetie, they had a lovely manicure. The inversion makes more sense when you remember that ''Supernatural'' is targeting a [[EstrogenBrigade very different audience]] than most of the shows on this list.

* The first ''Film/UltramanZearth'' plays this trope for laughs in the disastrous initial attack against Alien Benzene and his monster Cotton-Pope. The MYDO Strike Team tries a tactical strike on the alien, only to backfire with their jets blown up, but while all the men ends up badly bruised and injured, their faces covered in bandages (all which are AmusingInjuries) the sole female and TheChick, Tohru Hoshimi, suffers from having some soot on her nose and cheek. It helps that she's a genuine NiceGirl and the only character who treats Asahi (Zearth's accident-prone human form) with respect instead of picking on him repeatedly.

** In the Season 4 episode "Delete", Chloe shows absolutely no injury after she has been slammed head-first into walls multiple times, thrown down two flights of stairs and hit by a few of Lana's most vicious kicks, with at least one directly to the face. Oddly, despite Lana's TheChick status, she actually had blood on her face when it is over and she definitely isn't beaten as badly as Chloe.

** Padme is the same in the prequels, but at least in her case, her clothing usually seems to have been made with combat in mind in such situations. In the climax of ''Revenge of the Sith'', [[spoiler: Anakin, having embraced his Darth Vader persona by this time (although not yet in the cybernetic suit and mask) Force-chokes her in a mistakenly vengeful rage. Instead of breaking into undignified gagging as Admiral Motti did in ''A New Hope'', Padme only gasps softly and then faints]].

** A male example: The Fourth Doctor has [[UglyCute odd looks]], but possesses an almost [[VocalDissonance incongruously]] beautiful [[BadassBaritone deep]] [[VoiceOfDramatic dramatic]] voice that was commonly remarked upon at the time. Unwillingness to even temporarily ruin this results in a scene in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E5TheRobotsOfDeath "The Robots of Death"]] where his voice is completely unaffected by the fact that he is inhaling copious amounts of {{helium|Speech}}. He later gives a HandWave to Leela that his BizarreAlienBiology includes "a larynx that can put up with anything".

* Vanessa, the DumbBlonde {{Idiot Hero}}ine of the French comic ''ComicBook/LesBlondes'' regularly gets injured in various {{slapstick|KnowsNoGender}} ways and is regularly seen recovering in the hospital while relating her latest mishap to her friends. None of her accidents leave her with lasting scars that would mar her good looks.

* ''Manga/{{Gintama}}'': Kagura regularly avert this. She is seen picking her nose or ears nearly as often as Gintoki, and even proud herself in being the first Shonen Jump heroine to vomit on television. But aside from her, and even though the series have a good measure of SlapstickKnowsNoGender, the other female characters tend to be subjected to milder cases of ToiletHumour, if any, compared to what the guys get into.

* The leading heroines of ''Manga/SailorMoon'' are often the victims of AmusingInjuries, thanks to the fact that SlapstickKnowsNoGender. Heck, at one point, Usagi even ends up being the butt of a fart joke. The others are not amused.

* One episode of ''Anime/YokaiWatch'' features a {{youkai}} that makes people flatulent. Eleven-year-old Nate and the other boys don't think that girls can fart. Nate is horrified when his [[SlapstickKnowsNoGender crush Katie]] proves him wrong.

If a girl regularly averts this and it's PlayedForLaughs, she is probably a case of SlapstickKnowsNoGender. Compare DirtForcefield, KickingAssInAllHerFinery. Contrast UnkemptBeauty. For the clothing only, see BulletProofFashionPlate. A common specific form involves characters (especially women) who DoesNotLikeShoes, whose feet are very rarely shown to be as dirty and/or calloused as those of people who habitually go barefoot outdoors are in real life.

* Bo from ''Series/LostGirl'' ends up bruised and bloodied on a regular basis but, being a [[HornyDevils succubus]] with ready access to a bunch of willing partners, rarely takes long to restore her health and with it her drop-dead gorgeous looks. Interestingly, Bo is so ridiculously beautiful that even while limping and being covered in cuts, slashes and her own blood from head to toe doesn't detract much from her attractiveness in the first place.

* ''VideoGame/{{Dislyte}}'': In the Ruler's Law event, [[spoiler:while Jin Yuyao shows Alexa to Abigail through her communicator, Alexa says that she's covered in bruises, has a bloodied mouth and bruised legs. Yet, her sprite only has a couple of bruises on her face and doesn't look too badly beat up otherwise.]]