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"But one day, an angel of fortune as beautiful and radiant as a thousand suns appeared above the man. She had come to save him, and lifted him out of the hole with ease. With her beauty by his side, the man started to become admired and respected by everyone."

Heavenly beings that demonstrate their goodness and divinity through their equally beautiful physical appearance.

We all know angels in traditional religion run the gamut from being light-based mind shattering horrors to the basically human, and the human flavor are almost always divinely hot. This rule is almost without exception.

This trope is largely derived from Greek theories of divinity and beauty. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle thought that the gods were closer to Goodness Itself than humans and as such should be more perfect in all dimensions, including aesthetics. This theory that ultimate goodness includes perfect beauty would become re-popularized in the context of the angels around The Renaissance, after philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and artists like Petrarch attempted to fit the Greek theory of beauty into Christianity.

As one would expect, this is an exceptionally popular trope in Renaissance and Romantic-era religious Art. More Old Testament based descriptions of angels and God appearing as benevolent terrors that kill those who see them would go out of style until modern internet culture's obsession with making things Darker and Edgier. Even still, if a work is trying to make a New Testament-looking angel, this is trope they go to, whether in Film, Television, Video Games, or any other new medium.

A Sub-Trope of Inhumanly Beautiful Race, when it doesn't apply to human saints, and Beauty Equals Goodness, since the trope relies on the audience assuming physical beauty reflects the inner perfections of the Heavenly Host. The need to make non-humans beautiful also lead to the Winged Humanoid trope, since artists know what beautiful humans look like better than anything and the wings quickly establish divinity, since they're used to fly around Heaven Above. This trope almost always corresponds with God Is Good when it applies to God. If it doesn't then, the work is probably using Light Is Not Good because the audience has a tradition-ingrained association with the divine and the beautiful. Divinely Appearing Demons often imitate the divine by taking on the beauty and light this trope associates with them.

Contrast Hot as Hell and Angelic Abomination. Their boss may also be a Hot God as well. Not related to Lovely Angels.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • An ad campaign for Lynx deodorant used the tagline "angels will fall", and showed hot female angels plunging from Heaven to earth to be near the guy spraying on Lynx. Axe ran a similar campaign in the US.
  • Alluded to by the Victoria's Secret Angels, models who advertise Victoria's Secret products, sometimes by wearing winglike structures.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Ah! My Goddess: Every Goddess (who are themselves Hot Gods) has a very hot and barely-dressed angel to assist them with supernatural stuff.
  • AIR: Kannabi-no-Mikoto. Misuzu who is the current incarnation of Kanna is often depicted this way outside the anime.
  • Angel Sanctuary: In-universe, Adam Kadamon is considered the most beautiful entity god has ever created.
  • Black Butler (2008): Ash and Angela both count, though being pretty is hardly a rare trait. May become less (or more) sexy when you find out they're the same person.
  • Cardcaptor Sakura
    • Nadeshiko Kinomoto was a beautiful young model who died and transformed into an angel in Heaven. Her husband even compared her to an angel when they first met.
    • Yue is evocative of this to many fan girls, though whether he is an angel or not isn't clear. He's a creation of Clow, so it's possible he's not a real angel any more than Kerberos, Clow's other creation, is a lion. He certainly looks the part, though.
  • Daimos: Erika is an Angelic Alien Princess who's sought out by many men for her beauty. Her brother, Richter, also has an angelic appearance and long, blonde hair, but he's a tyrant and a warmonger.
  • DEVILMAN crybaby has Satan. While he's the main villain with an insanely sinister personality and set of ideals, there's no denying just how pretty-looking he is, and his beauty is even noted by other characters.
  • Devils and Realist has some of these, but the most of the devils are just as pretty.
  • Digimon plays with this extensively. For the most part, their faces are obscured by helmets, but Angemon and Angewomon otherwise qualify well. Ophanimon's unmasked artwork clinches this in her case. Cherubimon is a non-human example.
  • D.N.Angel: Dark and Krad are technically not angels but the two halves of a living artwork (literally, not figuratively), but the angel motif in their designs is clear even without the manga's title. Dark in particular is portrayed as a bad boy heart breaker womanizer.
  • High School D×D: With a series filled with attractive demons you'd expect there'd be at least one. We do get this in the form of Saint Brave Irina Shidou. Archangel Gabriel is also said to be the Most Beautiful Woman in Heaven, but we never see her face... until really late in the story.
  • In The Seven Deadly Sins, all supernatural races are beautiful in different ways. The beauty of Goddess Clan members is lithe and ethereal, tending towards white. That's not a metaphor for Caucasian descent- their hair and eyes are true white, variations of silver, blue or pale gold depending on the individual. When the Clan's princess is throwing a lot of power around, it/she burns so brightly that only the colour of her eyes is visible. It's likely the Supreme Goddess deliberately invoked this trope, to make it even easier for her army to make alliances.
  • Tsuki Pro: Half of "Origins" illustration series, depicting the cast of Bishounen idols as angels and demons.
  • The Vision of Escaflowne: The imagery surrounding the Winged Humanoid race often invokes the trope.
    • When Hitomi sees Van shirtless and with his wings spread for the first time, she's extremely impressed and tells him "But your wings are beautiful!"
    • In-story, Van and Folken's very lovely-looking mother Varie was one of them and her husband Gaoh met her when she had her wings extended, which completely fascinated him.

    Art 
  • Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble sculptures display godly beauty (muscled bodies, soft features, and unblemished skin) that would become a standard during The Renaissance.
    • The Apollo Belvedere shows the god casually walking about in a human form, which is of course devoid of all imperfections and fits every Greco-Roman criteria of beauty. The sheer ease of Apollo's walk lets the audience know this isn't one of the forms the gods shapeshift into for the sake of deceit: rather, they are effortlessly beautiful when they are just being them.
    • The Rape of Proserpina: Proserpina, the goddess of spring, plays it straight by being a cute-looking teenager. Pluto averts it because while his body is muscular, he's a middle-aged man with a face full of wrinkles.
  • The Birth of Venus (Bouguereau): Venus is a beautiful woman as usual, but she is given an unusual air of purity and divinity thanks to being surrounded by a choir of winged children and minor deities at her birth.
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti:
    • His sculpture of an Angel in the Basilica of San Domenico is a child whose hair and wings are so well-ordered that not a feather or hair pops out of place. The whole body of the angel is ordered, making it pleasant to look at, just as the angel's whole being has been ordered to perfection by God.
    • The David is representing the king's saintliness rather than his literal physical appearance, and as such David is a flawless man deep in thought and full of life. The tell that the sculpture shows his spiritual status as a foreshadowing of Christ is that his penis is uncircumcised despite being a Jewish king.
    • Pietà:
      • The dead Christ shows no signs of death, with even his famous wounds reduced to nail marks. Instead, Christ looks like a beautiful man fully alive, with luscious hair, healthy veins flowing down his strong arms, and an expression of serenity that shows the beatitude he shares with the Father and the Holy Ghost as one of the Holy Trinity.
      • The Virgin Mary doesn't have a wrinkle on her despite the 33-year old son she holds in her arm. She retains all the youthful beauty of a virgin, not only because she is one, but because her Immaculate Conception and mothership of God have made her closer to the source of all life and goodness than any other, allowing the beauty of Paradise to shine in her more than any born of Eve.
  • Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel:
    • The subject of the painting is portrayed as an athletic, handsome young man who has retained his feathery angel wings after his betrayal, although they are black now.
    • Subverted with the good angels who, upon closer inspection, have poorly-detailed features that aren't ugly but you can't call them beautiful either.
  • Rosso Fiorentino's The Dead Christ With Angels shows the scourged, crucified, and lanced corpse of the Son of God as a muscular nude flooding with light. There isn't a bruise or a drop of blood on him, to the point that if you didn't know the subject, you'd think he was a sleeping god rather than the corpse of the God.
  • Raphael Sanzio:
    • The Archangel Michael in St. Michael Vanquishing Satan is a well-toned, pale-skinned youth with a face at peace and a step as light as can be when crushing the Devil into Hell. Despite being a warrior, Michael shows no sign of scarring or gore since his total contemplation of the Trinity has rendered him immune to the death and suffering Satan has brought into the world; in fact, that beauty is what allows him to crush the deformed demon out of the idyllic landscape of Paradise and into the gaping void of eternal darkness.
    • Sistine Madonna:
      • This Madonna is a woman of skin white as snow and hair smooth as silk, both befitting her stainless soul graced by the Holy Spirit and her virginal body wherein God the Son was conceived.
      • The two cherubim at the bottom of the portrait are portrayed as chubby little children leaning on the fourth wall. Their wistful looks render them positively adorable, which works quite well as a way to make audiences admire and long for their holy innocence.
  • Sistine Chapel:
    • In all the ceiling frescoes, God is not shown as a disembodied hand or a collection of light, but as a man with all his natural powers, stretching His massive arms as they create souls and flipping his long locks behind Him to see Day and Night be separated from each other. Michelangelo Buonarroti manages to give God the height of human beauty despite depicting him as an old man; he achieves this by giving God a massive grey beard without any wrinkled skin or emaciated limbs.
    • Christ in The Last Judgement foregoes the traditional beard and wounds given to Him in traditional art to render him a youthful and pristine Apollo-like figure. His muscles are highlighted by a Holy Backlight just as the light contrasts with his wavy brown hair, all there to show the divine perfection of Christ.
  • Sandro Botticelli:
    • Many of his devotional artworks, like the 1481 Madonna of the Magnificat, present this trope, so much that the colloquial term "Botticelli's angel" could be used as a synonymous.

    Comic Books 
  • Empowered: Charity, one half of the superhero Divangelic, is dressed as an angel and is quite attractive.
  • Hellblazer: Subverted, where one demon has such a face... because she ripped it off an actual angel.
  • Lady Death: Aquiessence was a female angel sent by Heaven to bring the titular protagonist to their side by seducing her with her intoxicating scent.
  • The Sandman (1989): A pair of angels take the form of immaculate pale-skinned blondes who are as pleasing to the eye as the demons are a torture to look at.
  • X-Men: Angel is a mutant whose only superpower is having wings but gets so many compliments on his appearance that it's not unreasonable to think he could get mistaken for the real thing if that wasn't a factor in his codename already.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Date with an Angel: The eponymous angel, who gets stranded on Earth after breaking her wing in a collision with a satellite, becomes the face of the 'Celestial Beauty' campaign being run by a cosmetics company.
  • The Devil's Advocate: The Devil briefly takes on his celestial form at the end after exploding into a fiery rage, essentially looking like Keanu Reeves with angel wings.
  • Ghosts of Girlfriends Past: The final ghost appears as an incredibly beautiful angel in a flowing white dress.
  • Little Nicky: When Nicky finds himself in Fluffy Cloud Heaven, the angels are all attractive perky women. One of them, played by Reese Witherspoon, reveals that she's his mother.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: A rejected idea was to have Sauron (who is basically a Fallen Angel capable of altering his shape) appear in his fair form as Annatar to beguile Aragorn during the final battle at the gates of Mordor. This did result in some deleted footage, but was replaced with the Aragorn vs. Troll fight.
  • The Prophecy: Zigzagged by the different angels. Gabriel is played by the gaunt-looking Christopher Walken, Lucifer is played by an attractive-but-still-scary Viggo Mortensen, Michael is played by leading man Eric Roberts, and Pyriel is an outright Pretty Boy (interestingly, also the most evil of those four). Danyael is good-looking enough to get a human woman to fall in love with him, passing his looks on to his hybrid son.
  • Reefer Madness: The Musical: In the song "Listen to Jesus, Jimmy!", Jesus is joined by a dozen backup singers/showgirls dressed in sexy angel outfits.

    Literature 
  • The Divine Comedy: Beatrice's beauty is constantly topped whenever she ascends to a higher sphere in Heaven and gets that much closer to taking her throne beside the Queen of Heaven. This strange evolution happens because all of Beatrice's life and joy is a reflection of the living light of the Trinity, which makes her so godly that her smile on Saturn would snap a man's mind just as Jupiter's power incinerated Semele on sight. By the time they reach her throne, the poet has totally yielded and admits no words or memory could fully capture her beauty, leaving only the omniscient Creator to ever fully see Beatrice for the goddess He has made her.
    "Here her holy beauty is not denied—ascent makes it more perfect."
  • The Faerie Queene: Belphoebe's appearance is described as if she were a god or angel. Her skin is said to be as white as an angel, her rosy cheeks resemble ambrosia, and her eyes are like the stars. And just like biblical angels, her beauty is so overwhelming that it terrifies those that see her (or at least Braggadochio).
  • Heretical Edge: The Seosten look like this and it's the few ways to identify the species, since they don't ping the Stranger-sense. Ethereal is a recurrent adjective.
  • Kushiel's Legacy: The angels themselves are only seen in iconography, but their distant descendants, the people of Terre d'Ange, are famous for incredible beauty that doesn't fade with age.
  • Lamb: Angels take the form of ridiculously attractive blondes. The main angel, Raziel, is sufficiently handsome enough to regularly fluster Biff despite Biff's insistent heterosexuality and Raziel's infuriating stupidity.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The elven lady Galadriel has all the majesty befitting one born in the Undying Lands of the West and sanctified by a pure Ring of Power. Her grace is enough to make Gimli the Dwarf overcome his prejudice against elf and swear to devote his life to her, so long as he can have a strand of her splendid hair. It is one of the great tragedies of the War of the Ring that she must leave Middle-earth without the sight of her and go to her home amongst the Powers of Arda in the True West.
  • The Space Trilogy:
    • The Green Lady of Venus is not descended from Adam, so she retains the original goodness humanity lost in Paradise. As such, she has a telepathic link with Jesus at all times and is so innocently beautiful that Ransom casually calls her a goddess shortly after seeing her from afar.
      "Beautiful, naked, shameless, young — she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street — that made her a Madonna."
    • In That Hideous Strength, the new King Arthur, made immortal after being changed by the gods of the Deep Heavens, retains the freshness of a twenty-year old boy, the golden mane of full-grown man, and the apparent strength of a soldier somewhere between the two. Jane Studdock adores him more after a glance than she ever adored her own husband and feels her beauty grow just by being in his sanctified presence.
  • The Tales of Paul Twister: Aylwyn combines this with Amazonian Beauty. Paul seems to think she's hot because she's tall and strong and beautiful and also because of her wings.
  • Till We Have Faces: Psyche's beauty leads the common-folk of Glome to worship her as a goddess. Her cult grows to the point that the local priest comes to believe she is the Blessed of their myths and plans to sacrifice her to their god, the Shadowbrute, so she can be his bride in the darkness. Once she meets and marries the god, she becomes prettier than ever and soon after has her own temples where she is worshiped.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Babylon 5: Ambassador Kosh is seen as such by various races due to the Vorlon's Ancient Conspiracy to manipulate the younger races into being Vorlon pawns for the coming battle with the Shadows.
  • Good Omens (2019):
    • Aziraphale, Crowley certainly thinks so.
    • Season 2 gives us beautiful angel Crowley, who radiates happiness while making stars. Aziraphale is smitten.
  • Supernatural: Castiel is this to many fans; Michael, in the form of Matt Cohen and Jake Abel; Anna from Season 4 and 5; Season 6 briefly introduced another female angel named Rachel. Averted with Zachariah. These may not count as this trope however. They use hosts, so technically the fanbase is finding the human hosts pretty, not the actual angels. The angels themselves are actually of the Angelic Abomination variety, but the show has never shown their true forms. The only angel whose celestial form is explicitly described as "beautiful" by another angel is Lucifer, at least before his Fall from Heaven—there are hints that millennia of pure evil has done a number on him.

    Music 

    Mythology and Religion 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Demon: The Fallen: While most demons drive mortals who witness their true forms insane with horror, the few who still have low Torment do so with the angelic beauty they retained since the Days of Creation.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Aasimars, people with a celestial being in their ancestry, are frequently quite beautiful.
    • Devas, angels incarnated in humanoid bodies, are known to have an otherworldly beauty.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels legion, and his counterpart Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children are Long Haired Pretty Boys and described as the most beautiful of the Primarchs; Fulgrim seemingly being the most physically attractive and Sanguinius radiating a sort of ethereal, not-all-there beauty. This trait also to a lesser degree applies to their chapters, who share a genetic heritage with them.

    Video Games 
  • Arena of Valor: Lauriel, as the Archangel, takes on the classical "beautiful blonde female with wings" trope and runs with it with a Stripperiffic outfit. Her Divine Grace skin also does this.
  • Bayonetta: Zigzags this trope all over the place. Angels take on a wide variety of non-sexualized forms (Winged Humanoids, Dragons, Wheels, and hot rods for starters). However, hit them hard enough and that all falls off. What's underneath is NOT pretty. Played more or less straight however with the Joys, who appear as hot, jiggly women-like humanoids.
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine: Zig-zagged. The game occurs within Joey Drew Studios, which had a cartoon angel named Alice Angel among its stars. Alice, the cartoon character, has a cute face and an hourglass figure. But then, there are the attempts to bring the cartoon characters into reality by using the souls of Joey Drew's employees — two of which are versions of Alice, known as Susie and Allison. The first of these that Henry encounters is incredibly deformed and also happens to be criminally insane. The second is much more attractive and much kinder — enough that a halo can be seen over her head with the seeing tool.
  • Darksiders: Uriel (yes, that Uriel) is, as a notable departure from traditional biblical depictions, a dark-skinned blonde Action Girl.
  • Nexus Clash: Angels have this when they're the angelic classes that don't turn into Clock Punk constructs. The Holy Word really prefer the latter, but someone has to keep up public relations and recruitment.
  • Omen of Sorrow: Played with with Zafkiel, who is very-good looking but doesn't necessarily appears divine like most examples of this trope, since she is an Fallen Angel that lost contact with her fellow celestials during her quest to hunt evil. She still possess blonde hair and occasionally displays wings to mark her true nature.
  • Pokémon: The Gardevoir species has a beautiful, feminine appearance (though it's just as likely to be male as female). According to Word of God, it is supposed to resemble an angel, and its Pokédex entries emphasize its protective nature.
  • Shin Megami Tensei largely averts this. The root-standard "Angel" is a young winged woman... covered in bondage straps, including one over her eyes; it's actually pretty creepy. After that, angels come in two categories: harsh, masculine warrior, or Humanoid Abomination (in other words, close to the Biblical depiction). The only angels that could be described as pretty are Gabriel and Lucifer's angelic form (the one Persona 3 FES dubbed "Helel").
  • Star Trek Judgment Rites: One episode has Kirk dealing with holograms representing two separate cultures of single-celled creatures, who claim to be at war with each other. The hologram representing the Omegan culture is a beautiful angelic figure, though his words are anything but angelic. His appearance is enough to convince Ensign Jons, a geneticist brought along for the mission, that the Omegans should be assisted in destroying their enemies.

    Visual Novels 

    Webcomics 
  • Cursed Princess Club: During his unhappy days at military boarding school, Prince Frederick becomes obsessed with a fairy tale about one. In it, a man who is ridiculed for being unable to escape a deep hole is rescued by a beautiful blonde "angel of fortune" who becomes his lover, gives him courage to fight a giant serpent, and brings him respect from his peers. This makes Frederick hopeful that an angel of fortune will someday come into his own life. A major reason he is so resistant to his Arranged Marriage to Gwendolyn is because her creepy appearance is nothing like the angel from the tale. Over time, however, he realizes that while Gwen may not look like an angel, she certainly acts like one.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Mortis arc features the Daughter, embodiment of the Light Side of the Force, who usually takes the form of a beautiful, young woman, who visibly glows.

Alternative Title(s): Hot Angel, Our Angels Are Hot

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