Vain Sorceress

She's bewitching, she's enchanting, she's absolutely Glamourous.

"When a woman stays young and beautiful forever, the world is hers."

— Queen Ravenna, Snow White & the Huntsman

So, by studying magic or through being extraordinarily gifted genetically, you've managed to acquire the power to cast flashy destructive spells, brainwash people en masse, and pretty much bend the whole of reality to your will. What is the first thing you do?

Well... if you're a woman (or in more modern depictions, a man or a woman), the first thing you probably do is use your magic to make yourself look like a Vogue cover model. As villains tend to be defined by their vices, it's only natural then, that many villainesses and more than a few villains would gravitate towards vanity.

Until the 19th century, this had been predominantly a female trope, but this is no longer true: one of the most famous examples set in (relatively) modern times is a male, Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde's famous novel.

Whereas the female variant is usually a witch using magic to keep herself young and beautiful (human sacrifices optional), the male variant is more often a sexy but bloodsucking ''bad boy'' vampire as first made famous with the Byronic Hero Lord Ruthven in John Polidori's 1819 "The Vampyre", which pioneered the male vampire as the Spear Counterpart to the Vain Sorceress.

While any sorceress who looks over 40 runs the risk of being ridiculed for her less than perfect looks, ancient-looking wizards, Warlocks, and male magic users are rarely subject to the same kind of ribbing. They will also be far less likely to fly off of the handle when called "Old man" or "Gramps", even when they have no grandchildren. Many of them may actually be trying to purposely cultivate the "wizened old man" look to inspire respect or get their enemies to underestimate them. It should be noted that some female characters do act this way as well, but they're going for the obvious smart-alecky hag gimmick, which only in recent years has become popular enough to be taken seriously.

The Vain Sorceress might just be a particular version of the rapidly-vanishing rule that in fantasy stories, all female main characters must appear youthful in appearance regardless of age. This is especially true for female mages who are associated with big strong virile warriors as their tanks; the difference between a good mage and the Vain Sorceress is only about 30% less clothing and 30% more purple dye.

The Vain Sorceress's youthfulness is often related to a specific power, where the character has to maintain their appearance by sucking energy from the young — if not be an outright vampire. Evil sorceresses tend to be far more obsessed with the perfection of their appearance and go to further lengths to maintain it than good ones will. They may even go so far as to pull a Grand Theft Me, stealing a younger, prettier body to act as the vessel for their soul. In any case, they have to be the Fairest of Them All... by any means necessary. If the Vain Sorceress can't achieve her desired beauty via her own power, she may bargain with a greater evil to receive it in exchange for services rendered.

If there's a Black Magician Girl in the hero's party, the Vain Sorceress will mock her unrefined, tomboyish look and intentionally flirt with the hero to make her mad. If there isn't, she'll mock the White Magician Girl's naivete. This again goes back to her vanity: the presence of other, younger females that spend most of their time with the good-looking heroic opposition means that putting them down and preserving her top spot is naturally a high priority.

Works that believe Vanity Is Feminine are just about guaranteed to have at least one Vain Sorceress running around; in such works, male characters who act this way are usually Sissy Villains.

Sometimes the Vain Sorceress is the Dark Magical Girl all grown up, so the heroine is the 'good' version. If the protagonist is a young male, this can venture into unintended Freudian overtones.

If the Vain Sorceress suffers from the Green-Eyed Monster, she often features as the Fairest of Them All. Usually delights in answering Revenge SVPs.

Note: this trope doesn't have anything to do with shapeshifting, deceptive illusion, or the more drastic physical changes that a male or female magic user may undergo in their campaign against an enemy. This is strictly a vanity thing. (It's interesting to note, however, how much prettier and more human-looking a female mage's monstrous forms are compared to those of a male mage.)

Contrast the Wicked Witch, who is equally villainous but lacks the beauty, and the Hot Witch, who has the beauty but lacks the obsession. If this person is also much older than they seem, then they are Really 700 Years Old. Such a villainess may be The Vamp, but the Vain Sorceress doesn't have to have the unchaste relationships or the overtly sexualized appearance that characterize that trope; rather, she may prefer and achieve the image of a beautiful Proper Lady. What defines this trope is the obsession with beauty, not necessarily with using it to seduce people. Compare Plastic Bitch, which uses 'artificial methods' (in this case plastic surgery) to enhance a vain and proud person's appearance.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Catherine from Black Clover is a witch and a member of the Eye of the Midnight Sun who drains the mana of her victims to make herself look younger. This has the rather nasty side effect of aging her victims until they die. After Yuno kicks her ass and forces Catherine to burn up most of her mana to defend herself from his attack, her appearance reverts to that of an old lady in her 70's. At this point she becomes desperate enough to regain her youth that she decides to attack the nearest person she can find, outright demanding that they give her their mana. Unfortunately, she ends up attacking Charmy, who finishes what Yuno started under the mistaken belief that Catherine was after her food.
• Princess Vina in Dragon Half uses magic to make herself look like a beautiful teenage girl... not because she's old (she really is a teenager), but because in her natural body she's a small purple slime.
• Big Bad Dante from Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) turns out to be a several centuries-old Body Surfer who has routinely switched bodies, and created a conspiracy to make the government create desperation that would drive people into making new Philosopher's Stones she can steal and use to fuel her repeated body-hopping, to keep herself from growing old and dying.
• Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics had an episode, "The Crystal Ball", where an evil witch murdered a beautiful woman and stole her identity. To keep herself beautiful and young, she keeps a beautiful princess trapped in her castle, and performed an unholy ritual every night where she bites into her neck and drains her of her lifeforce, and leaves her a rotting corpse. For reasons unexplained, the princess revives within a matter of seconds after the ritual is performed. When the murdered woman's sons find out what is going on, she turns two of them into animals, but the youngest escapes and is able to destroy her.
  • In the English and Hebrew Dub, the scenes with the biting were removed, and she simply switches ages with the princess. This is actually closer to the original story. The Spanish changed it to drinking her youth but showed the biting.
• Tsubaki the Dark Priestess from Inuyasha wanted the Shikon no Tama to keep her power, youth, and beauty, and as a strike for not being chosen as its keeper despite her abilities. She tried to steal it from Kikyou, with less than positive consequences, and when Naraku arrived to recruit her carrying some parts of the Jewel, he convinced her to work for him by restoring her beauty and youth.
• In The Legend of Snow White, the Queen wants to steal Snow White's body instead of eating her heart. And it's revealed that she's not actually the Queen, but stole her body instead when she was a child. She (or even 'it') may have spent generations Body Surfing from beauty queen to beauty queen...
• Alcyone from Magic Knight Rayearth is rather irritated when Umi calls her Oba-San. (So Umi does it as often as possible.)
• In Mini Moni The Movie: Okashi na Daibōken!, the Fairy Queen Nakajalinu is extremely proud of her beauty and tall, slender body, using magic to petrify anything she hates, like cake. She hates cakes because they turn her into a chibi, which she sees as ugly.
• Naruto features two characters who use unnatural means to keep themselves looking young, but only one of them does it out of vanity. Tsunade (a heroic example) uses a jutsu to adjust her apparent age, mostly to keep herself looking pretty, but sometimes as a way to elude creditors after her for her gambling debts. In the final chapter that takes place a decade or so later, Tsunade looks even younger.
• Evangeline A.K. McDowell from Negima! Magister Negi Magi normally has the appearance of a 10-year old girl (being a vampire, she doesn't age), but switches to a sexy adult woman form if she wants to be taken seriously - at least by adults - or wishes to flaunt her adult form's sex appeal (particularly to 10-year-old Negi, and often while naked; she seems to like seeing his flustered and embarrassed reaction).
• In Reborn! (2004), Mammon says that it is common for female illusionists to make their bodies disappear during their death throes so they don't leave an unsightly corpse behind. He thinks this is what is happening when Chrome's body disappears, but she is actually quite alive and ready to continue the fight.
• Record of Lodoss War features Karla, a witch who must steal the bodies of others to survive. Although she can possess anyone she chooses, she prefers to possess beautiful, young, magically-talented females (like Laylia the priestess).
• Sailor Moon:
  • Queen Nehelenia. She consumed the dreams of the young and happy to stay beautiful because she caught a glimpse of her ugly future self in her Magic Mirror and was terrified.
    • In the anime, this was partially an after-effect of said Magic Mirror putting the whammy on her. She started out as a vain yet mostly naive queen who totally lost it when the mirror showed her not only her ugly future self, but how everyone would abandon her when she lost her beauty. By the end of Super S she was crazy and vain enough to choose being imprisoned in said mirror than losing her good looks until Sailor Galaxia released her.
  • The Ayakashi Sisters were The Psycho Rangers of the R Season, and to remark on such a role they were always taunting each other about not looking young (the eldest sister, Petz, was the most usual butt of jokes) and applying make-up to their pretty faces when off-duty. They're actually more heroic than the standard and ultimately have Heel Face Turns, becoming the owners of a small make-up store in the process.
  • To a smaller degree, also Green Esmeraude.
• Inverted in Slayers: Lina Inverse, being something of a late bloomer, is always on the lookout for any magical item that will increase her apparent age (and with it, her bust and hip measurements).

Comic Books

• All-Star Comics: The Loreli isn't depicted using her magic on her own appearance despite looking very different from all the other much shorter stooped witches, but delights in using it to make her opponents look twisted and ugly.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Rupert Giles's great-aunts Sophronia and Lavinia introduced in the Angel & Faith comic book bartered their souls to demons in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. They were smart enough to include the condition that the demons would only get their souls at the first visible sign of aging (the demons weren't very bright). Unfortunately for them, the end of magic restored the flow of time to them. Their first gray hairs were quickly followed by a bunch of demons looking to collect. Fortunately, Angel and Faith were able to fight them off.
• ElfQuest: Winnowill is an elf, and subsequently her immortal beauty isn't something she needs to aspire for, but her obsession with absolute, serene perfection where nothing ever changes or decays is very much in the style of this trope. She would like nothing more than have her followers in eternal sleep in a timeless place, where she could control their dreams forever.
• Empowered: Sistah Spooky. She was an unattractive nerd until she made a Deal with the Devil to become beautiful. The incompetent demon in charge of her case infused her with exponentially more infernal magic than necessary, so her sorcerous powers were an accidental bonus. She can throw fits of jealously when she feels her good looks are not sufficiently admired. Her vanity and insecurity are implied to be the reason she hates naturally beautiful Emp.
• Fables: Inverted. Frau Totenkinder is one of, if not the most powerful sorceress in existence. Part of this granted her eternal life and beauty, but she intentionally aged herself to become an old lady, so that she would not be distracted by her youth. Or by handsome princes whom she wanted to curse/not fall in love with.
• Magic: the Gathering (IDW): Sifa Grent is a Planeswalker who uses her magic to drain life from others in order to maintain her youth and beauty.
• The Mighty Thor: Amora, the Enchantress. Her vanity masses somewhere above the Gigaton range, as virtually everything in her immortal life hinges on her beauty in some fashion. Much of her magic is either dedicated to enhancing her appearance, or uses her beauty as a focus, or material component, such as her many versions of charm and mind-control spells. When recovering from injuries suffered in battle, her first and most driving need is to be sure her flawless face and perfect body have come through without permanent damage. In the event of injury or scarring, she has proven that she can repair the damage magically, though it seems to be power and time-intensive.
• Shadowman: Subverted in the original series by Valiant Comics — when the hundreds of years old voodoo housekeeper Nettie (who normally looks about 70 or so) is super-charged by a potent increase in magic in the world, she reflexively reverts to the young (and devastatingly beautiful) appearance she had when she was in her 20s. The subversion stems from the fact that she reveals she was ALWAYS capable of making this change, but never wanted to — in fact, she's incredibly annoyed by her youth and just wants to go back to being old.
• The Warlord: Both Ashiya and Motalla are Evil Sorceresses who use their magic to maintain a youthful visage.
• Warlord of Mars: Dejah Thoris: The Boora Witch lived for centuries by transferring her consciousness to other bodies, specially favoring young and beautiful female ones, which is why she chooses Dejah Thoris as her next vessel and uses it to usurp Helium's throne for herself. She isn't particularly picky either, as one of her previous bodies used to be a monstrous-looking Green Martian.
• Wonder Woman: Circe is a millennia-old magic user who frequently alters and tweaks her appearance with magic, almost always choosing to appear as a very attractive young woman unless her appearance is a temporary disguise.
• X-Men:
  • Justified in the case of the supervillainess Selene in that even if she did not regenerate, use her various Psychic Powers, or cast any of the spells she has picked up over the centuries she has to drain life from others just to stay alive. It's not even merely natural aging; if she goes too long without a Life Energy fix, she starts to revert to her true age — roughly seventeen thousand years old. Dust to dust indeed. Danielle Moonstar once discovered Selene's deepest fear was growing old and ugly... and that with every passing century the gorgeous woman is finding it more and more difficult to keep herself so very young and lovely...
  • It's implied that her Good Counterpart (or at least Less Evil Counterpart) Emma Frost uses her psychic powers to appear slightly more beautiful than she already is. Considering she's one of the few comic book characters to admit to plastic surgery this is certainly plausible, though with her looks it doesn't take too much effort to appear stunning.

Fan Works

• My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic: Dementia's obsession with her looks is her defining trait.

Film — Animated

• The original draft of The Emperor's New Groove, Kingdom of the Sun, had Yzma as one, planning to 'destroy the sun so that she could remain youthful forever (and rule the world). This is still present in the finished film to some degree, as Yzma is both The Fashionista and tends to use numerous herbal creams for her skin's benefit.
• The 1985 film Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer featured one of these as the primary antagonist.
• The most iconic example the Wicked Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; moreso in the Disney version, whose character design was reputedly based on Katharine Hepburn. This example also illustrates the primary paradox intrinsic to this trope: Why would an intelligent, powerful woman like the Queen be so crazily obsessed over something as seemingly paltry as mere physical appearance? Sure, vanity might explain part of it, but to go so far as to seek the death of a rival (who is not even aware of her grudge), and undergo a painful transformation to disguise herself so that she could personally carry out a murder plot? Seems a bit over the top, but then again, that's the warping nature of evil for you.
• In The Sword in the Stone, Madame Mim defies this trope. As a master shapeshifter, she can easily make herself look young and beautiful, but she admits that such a guise is only skin-deep and deep down she's "an ugly old creep!" Since Mim thinks Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad, she is perfectly happy being an ugly Wicked Witch.
• Mother Gothel in Tangled outright trounces the above-mentioned Wicked Queen; she embodies this trope par excellence, hoarding a magical healing flower to keep herself young and beautiful for centuries, and then kidnapping baby Rapunzel and raising her in a tower for 18 years when the flower's power is transferred to her. In addition, she often puts down Rapunzel and compliments herself.
• White Snake (2019): A male example with The "Little Daoist" who dresses elegantly and is a Long Haired Prettyboy, but has to wear a silk veil to hide a deforming scar on his lower jaw. He gets extremely angry when Verta calls him an "ugly little man" when she sees his unveiled face.

Film — Live-Action

• In The Brothers Grimm, the villainous Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci) was so desperate to remain beautiful and unsullied as plague ravaged her lands that she cast a spell on herself to live forever. Unfortunately, the spell didn't keep her from aging. Several centuries later, she's a bedridden old crone who sends out a hypnotized henchman to kidnap twelve young girls from a nearby village to prepare a ritual that will restore her beauty at the cost of the girls' lives. Her eternally-youthful reflection in a magic mirror is key to putting other people under her power. She succeeds in regaining her youth but Jacob smashes the mirror and she shatters, though the final shot reveals she may not be completely dead. At least the girls are rescued.
• Countess Dracula, a 1971 Hammer horror film based on the legends surrounding the "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Báthory. The Countess restores her youth and beauty by bathing in the blood of murdered virgins. While in her rejuvenated state, she takes the identity of her own daughter; a plan that gets complicated when her actual daughter returns home.
• In The Craft, teen witch Bonnie becomes this eventually. She uses a spell to heal her burn scars and finally sees herself as beautiful, ^note  she's played by Neve Campbell and was never ugly, but her self-consciousness about the scars and other people's remarks about them makes her think she's unattractive and dress in unflattering outfits which isn't treated as an inherently bad thing, but once she loses her shyness she becomes increasingly conceited and arrogant.
• Excalibur: Morgana Le Fay uses her magical powers to keep herself looking young into middle age. Interestingly, when Merlin goes into her dream and tricks her into casting a powerful mist spell, she releases so much energy that she ages far beyond what her natural age was originally.
• The Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus spend all their time looking for children to suck the life out of to make themselves look younger, with the added impetus once they've been resurrected of having to do this or they'll turn to dust. At one point, the 8(?)-year-old heroine says, "It doesn't matter how young or old you are. You sold your soul! You're the ugliest thing that's ever lived! And you know it!"
• In The Hugga Bunch TV Movie from the 80s, Witch/Queen Admira keeps herself young looking with the use of "young berries" which the 8-year-old heroine tries to procure for her aging grandmother. She gets her karmic comeuppance when the key that unlocks the glass case in which the young-berry tree is kept gets left inside the case, after which time the sorceress rapidly ages and dies.
• Kull the Conqueror: Implied Trope with Akivasha. Her true form is apparently a very ugly demon with horns, but she spends most of the film looking like a Hot Witch.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, Danique is actually an old crone but pretends to be a Femme Fatale using a youth charm. She's mightily pissed when Chloe shatters the Power Gem containing the spell. All the models in her fashion show too - they all look beautiful, but their reflections show them as deformed and disfigured, concealing their defects with magic.
• Rare, non-fey male example: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders (which 99% of viewers probably saw on MST3K) featured a jerkish newspaper reviewer who dabbled in magic and discovered that doing so caused him to age rapidly. He then concocted a spell to make himself young again, but it worked a little too well...
• In Oz the Great and Powerful, the Wicked Witch of the East is a hideous old crone, but spends most of the movie under a spell that makes her appear as a beautiful woman. Defied by the Wicked Witch of the West, who refuses to hide her appearance because she wants Oz to see the monster he's turned her into.
• Return to Oz features a witch who collects pretty female heads, and swaps between them like another woman changes dresses. (The idea came from the novel Ozma Of Oz, although the character was far less malevolent and more ditzy.)
• Like the original tale, in Snow White: A Tale of Terror Claudia is enamored with her physical appearance to the point that the magic mirror shows her to be beautiful in moments when she's not.
• In Snow White & the Huntsman, Wicked Queen Ravenna is using magic to maintain her youth and beauty, and taking Snow White's heart will allow her to live as a beauty forever. It's never really explained why.
• In Stardust, the witches' motivation for cutting out the Star's heart is to regain youth permanently and to a notably lesser extent, to become more powerful. There is a Lampshade Hanging on the trope, as the witch assigned to catch the star keeps using magic to keep a youthful appearance, and even though her sisters also desire youth, they scold her for wasting it. There's even a scene where the main witch notices something on her face and uses magic to remove it... and one of her boobs immediately sags. She fixes it with another spell.
• Supergirl (1984): The Big Bad is Selena, an arrogant, petty sorceress jealous of Supergirl's beauty.
• Thor: Ragnarok: Gender-Inverted; Thor invokes this trope when he criticizes Loki's snazzy all-black suit when they're on Earth (Thor himself having chosen a more casual, practical outfit).
  Loki: I can't see into the future, I'm not a witch.
  Thor: No? Then why do you dress like one?
  Loki: (offended) Hey.

Gamebooks

• In Sagard the Barbarian by Gary Gygax, the 4th book The Fire Demon has a sorceror trying to become the World's Most Beautiful person. He tries to achieve this by kidnapping specific men and women and then using his Fire Demon accomplice to exchange body parts with the victim. However, all this does is make him look like a grotesque freak as everything looks mismatched, though he's too delusional to realize this.

Literature

• In the Apprentice Adept series, the Yellow Adept has, and occasionally uses, a potion to restore her youth. The difficulty of making it keeps her old most of the time.
• Azure Bonds had one of these participating in a little conspiracy to create an obedient Super-Soldier/assassin. Her idea of this was to base their living construct on her own cloned body (after having to run out of one city due to bad publicity already) and garb in a chainmail with a "fashionable" gap on the chest, albeit magically protected anyway. While somehow expecting their creation to keep the low profile. Needless to say, such a "strategy" added extra attention to their other mishaps.
• In David Eddings' The Belgariad Prequel Belgarath the Sorcerer, a sorcerer's appearance seems to be connected to their mental image. While the original sorcerer Belgarath deliberately goes for either the old vagabond storyteller look or the hale and hearty old man appearance (and is still in remarkable physical shape, come to think of it, enough that many women find him very attractive), his daughter Polgara always looks quite stunning. She notes that an old woman is called a "crone" for a reason, and cronehood isn't exactly her idea of a positive impression.
  • Invoked in the case of the queens of Nyissa. They're chosen based on their similarity in both appearance and personality to the original queen, Salmissra, and given the same name on their coronation. If one stops looking like the original, she's killed and replaced, so each takes a series of drugs that keeps her looking young, but ends up making her mind somewhat erratic, and ultimately shortens her lifespan anyway. Every Salmissra is obsessed with preserving her youth as a matter of necessity.
• Achren, in The Chronicles of Prydain, is very much this trope; she uses spells to cultivate a much more beautiful appearance than she naturally has. Eilonwy, whom she abducted as a baby and raised as her niece, finds her vanity ridiculous.
• Watercrafters in Codex Alera can utilize their crafting to obscure or even eliminate most signs of aging, in addition to more complete shapeshifting.
• A rare case of a male character is Gerald Tarrant in the Coldfire Trilogy who systematically uses his magical powers to keep himself neat, well dressed, and handsome. Although Damien frequently makes fun of his vanity, he also notices that it has a very practical bonus- Tarrant is always at his best appearance, and this helps him to make quite an impression.
• Discworld's witches are generally an exception; they intentionally cultivate the "hag" image, and very few are willing to mock them. Of course, the local rules of magic state that the natural shape of a witch or wizard quickly reasserts itself, so it's pointless for them to try to change their appearance.
  • Although when Magrat marries the king, she briefly muses that she might have to become a Witch Queen, which probably involves wearing revealing clothes.
    • Then again, considering Magrat doesn't exactly have much to reveal, it's probably for the best that she settled for a more sensible look and prefers ruling as a rather benevolent, if slightly too liberal and modern, queen.
  • During the Sourceror's reign, many UU wizards initially tried to youthen themselves with the more powerful magic. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, it didn't take too well, and having fifty years of aging coming back and sucker-punching you in the gut will ruin anyone's day.
  • Lady Lilith, Granny Weatherwax's evil older sister, looks pretty much like Esme would if she were fifty years younger. This is due to highly dangerous use of mirror magic.
• Cordelia of Elemental Masters is a subversion. She does everything she can to maintain her beauty, but it's because she wants the social power it confers, not out of vanity, and she's rather annoyed at all the things she has to do. When she gets the idea to start stealing the bodies of men, one of the benefits she thinks of is that she won't have to worry about staying young.
• The Fluted Girl provides a sci-fi example, mixed with the story's fairytale-like aesthetics. In a far future, Lady Belari is Really 700 Years Old beauty and immortality obsessed woman that will stop at nothing to retain her position. And since said position depends on being forever young actress, while Revitia treatment is expensive...
• In the series From Thief to King by Michael Williams, the sorceress Ravenna is mysterious, seductive, and stunningly beautiful... and has been a fixture at the royal court for decades. When her evil and manipulations become known to the heroes, the entire focus of their activities comes down to finding a way to destroy her... which turns out to hinge on the fact that the very potions and alchemical mixtures she uses to preserve her youth and exquisite beauty also make her vulnerable to other alchemical mixtures. Very much a case of her own vanity providing the means to defeat her.
• L. Frank Baum's Glinda of Oz features Coo-ee-oh, who is literally a vain sorceress, but she's an expert in magical machinery rather than beauty-enhancement, and when she gets transformed into a diamond swan by an enemy, she loves how beautiful she's become and instantly loses any interest in her previous life.
• In the novel Howl's Moving Castle, Howl himself is extremely vain about his appearance, claims to be thousands of years old, and has a reputation for seducing pretty girls and taking their souls the stealing souls is figurative of him being The Casanova and a rumor he spread himself, and he's actually a young guy from Wales in "our world". The Witch of the Waste also keeps herself looking young and beautiful through a deal with a fire demon and is much older than she appears.
• One of the Lord Darcy stories features a lord who uses a magical ritual to extend his youth. However, because of Equivalent Exchange, this reduces his lifespan; the vitality is going from his heart and lungs to his skin and hair.
• In The Magic Goes Away all mages use youth spells to extend their life spans. However, the female mage has the lowest physical age.
• In Mary de Morgan's "The Necklace Of Princess Fiorimonde", the titular princess practices sorcery in order to appear beautiful. When her father tries to get her into an Arranged Marriage, she vehemently opposes it because she's afraid that she would no longer be able to visit her Wicked Witch mentor and thus lose her beauty.
• All female Others in Sergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch (Series) use simple spells to maintain their appearance instead of spending half an hour every morning applying makeup. Alisa ends up losing her magic in the second novel and has to resort to putting up makeup the old-fashioned way. In New Watch, Svetlana reveals that she has stopped using magic outside their apartment in order to retain her humanity. It's strange that it's such a surprise for Anton, given that he had to have noticed her putting on makeup at some point (modern Russian women tend to try to look their best even when they're just stepping out for some milk). The only reason she uses it at home is that she hates ironing.
• Mages (male and female) who obsess over looks and use their powers for cosmetic purposes sometimes figure on the fringes of Tamora Pierce's books, portrayed with varying levels of sympathy. Varice Kingsford from The Immortals is part of the Big Bad's court and considered a waste of time at best by the protagonist, but is last seen sobbing amid the ruins of the palace (sans makeup) and saying that she just likes pretty things, and does that make her a bad person? Contrast the fourth Circle of Magic book, where a pox epidemic is traced back to a mage (one Eilisa Pearldrop, whose very name inspires contempt in the sensible mage protagonists) specializing in beauty magic, who messes up a weight-loss spell and, rather than pay for her magical waste to be disposed of safely, lets it get carried out in the sewage system, thereby creating a magically strengthened disease. Very unsexy.
  • Numair is literally a vain sorcerer, at least some of the time, but he doesn't fit into this trope very well, as he's a good person and knows when not to care about his appearance. One of his friends says he spends hours getting ready, then ruins his outfit by lying in the grass to watch meteor showers.
  • Varice gets a bit more depth in The Numair Chronicles, which features her as a main character. Turns out she's less vain and more enjoys creating beautiful things, whether that be in the elaborate cakes she makes, seamstress work, or in her own appearance. It causes some conflict with her father, who believes she should focus on more important magics.
• Dorian from The Picture of Dorian Gray is pretty much the male poster for the trope, having expressed the desire to never age or show any flaws so he could stay young and be loved by everyone. His portrait became uglier and older every time he did something bad, while Dorian remained young and handsome.
• In L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, Zixi's chief motivation is that while she makes herself beautiful in everyone else's eyes, she's still ugly in her own; she wants to fix that.
• Tascela in Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story Red Nails.
• Dark Councilor Nyriss from Revan thoroughly averts this. While she's a Sith Lord at her prime and perfectly capable of making herself youthful again, she chose not to and continued to show off the nasty effect of the dark side (think Palpatine after getting electrocuted with face tentacles and pinkish-white skin) as a testament to her power.
• In some of the earliest versions of the tale of Snow White, the Wicked Queen fears Snow White's maturing beauty because it symbolizes her impending death due to an ancient mythological trope that a person's child is his or her replacement — and she is Snow White's biological mother (not stepmother). So her efforts to kill Snow White are not based on physical vanity, but on a desperate hunger for immortality.
• In Stardust, the witches' motivation for cutting out the Star's heart is to regain youth permanently and to a notably lesser extent, to become more powerful.
• Sweet & Bitter Magic: Vera, the witch leader (High Councillor) has kept herself looking young and beautiful using her magic, though Tamsin can see some cracks in her appearance while close to her.
• Tales from the Flat Earth has the evil sorceress Queen Zorayas who summons and traps the Lord of Darkness, Azhrarn so that she can force him to fix her mutilated face (she normally wears a mask with a beautiful face and she already has a great body, so people think she's gorgeous under the mask). He takes it a step further and turns her into the World's Most Beautiful Woman. Within a few years from that time, she becomes obsessed with using her beauty to compel her victims into giving her their legendary treasures. How she met her end was through a cursed mirror that caused her to fall in lust with her own reflection.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Enchantresses and bad Witches use magic to stay beautiful, youthful-looking women indefinitely.
• Ileana in T*Witches who insists that other characters call her "Goddess".
• The Wheel of Time: Lanfear is as legendary for her unsurpassed beauty as for her power and depravity, and sold her soul to The Anti-God to become The Ageless. Exploited when she fools the protagonist for weeks by magically disguising herself as a fat old woman, then jokes that her pride could bear the extra weight.
• In Wise Child, it's heavily implied with Wise Child's mother Maeve. Maeve is described often as being very beautiful and proud, and having many male admirers. She offers Wise Child the chance to be taught how to be beautiful like her and to be admired by men in the same way, insinuating she uses her powers as a witch for just that.
• In The Witcher world it's so common that it not only gets lampshaded, but outright deconstructed. Virtually all the sorceresses are like this, at least in the Northern Kingdoms. This is due to the fact that while magical talent is distributed pretty evenly among population, it is, for all its Anachronism Stews, a late Medieval period, when a woman's purpose in life was marriage and motherhood. So, only girls who had a chance to take up magic were the ones with the worst marriage prospects — read, butt-ugly at best, if not outright cripples. Furthermore, there's a matter of prestige — Mages Guild couldn't allow its members to soil its image by their ugliness, which leads to the Lodge of Sorceresses consisting entirely of "... pseudo-pretty women with the cold, bitter eyes of ugly girls." Wizards mostly go for the respectable, wizened look instead, though those who don't tend to range from "average but distinguished" to "Bishōnen". But then, Sapkowski loves to deconstruct everything.
• Piers Anthony's earlier Xanth novels feature Iris, a sorceress who uses illusions to maintain her aura of beauty — although that was a bit less out of vanity for its own sake than the knowledge that it gave her an advantage in dealing with men. Later, Golem in the Gears featured the Sea-Hag, who used the body stealing version of this trope to live for thousands of years.
  • Not that Iris is unattractive; she is merely about 20 years older than she appears to be, and has put on a few extra pounds. Later in the series, she is given a youth potion and looks the way she presents herself for real.

Live-Action TV

• One of Fiona Goode's top priorities in American Horror Story: Coven - one that she'll kill or betray for - is to preserve her youth and beauty. When she learns that a spectral serial killer has been stalking her since childhood, she's only upset because he allowed her to get old.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?:
  • In the episode "The Tale of the Many Faces", a struggling model named Emma visits a strange woman named Madame Visage who gives her some powder that apparently helps her get a modeling job. (The powder didn't really do anything, considering that Emma was pretty to begin with) However, its revealed that Madame Visage is a Vain Sorceress and the face powder has properties that keep girls' faces looking younger and the skin smooth. She wants the faces to be in peak condition so that she can steal them and use them as her own face as a way to keep herself looking younger.
  • Another episode featured the beautiful owner of a cosmetics store who oddly enough for someone so vain avoids mirrors like the plague. Her beauty is only an illusion and mirrors reflect her true appearance as an old woman. She tries to use a magic ritual that involves turning young girls into dogs and cutting out their tongues in order to make her youth and beauty real. In the end, a mirror is used to break her power which saves the girls and causes time to return to her and everything she owns including her store. The storyteller's ending line says it all:
  In the end, all that was left of her beautiful illusion was dust and a pile of ugly rubble.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Catherine Madison from Season 1's "The Witch", who stole her own daughter's body to relive her high school glory days.
• One shows up in the Charmed episode "Freaky Phoebe" and soul-swaps herself into Phoebe's body. She has a lot of fun looking at herself, especially since her original face is terribly ugly.
• Doctor Who features Lady Cassandra O'Brien Δ17 as a Sci-Fi Counterpart who uses cosmetic surgery to retain her youth (although ironically, all those operations actually made her less attractive, essentially leaving her as a face on a sheet of skin stretched across a wheeled metal frame with a Brain in a Jar attached underneath). She actually sabotages a space station so she can use the insurance and ransom money to pay for more surgery. In a later episode, she uses the tried-and-true method of stealing younger bodies.
• Game of Thrones. At the end of "The Red Woman", Melisandre of Asshai strips naked in the privacy of her quarters... then takes off the necklace she's always seen wearing and reveals her true form: an ancient, hunch-backed crone with grey skin and wispy, strung out, bone-white hair. Though it's not clear if she maintains the glamor of a Hot Witch out of vanity or because she can more easily manipulate men this way.
• Not a mystic case, but the illusionist Candice of Heroes prefers to appear as Missy Perergrym, but as revealed in the second season, her real figure is about sixty pounds heavier.
• In the Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode "The Youth Killer", Helen of Troy returns to drain the youth out of unsuspecting perfect victims, sacrifices for the goddess Hecate, in her quest for immortality.
• Legend of the Seeker: Shota is revealed to eventually be much older than her appearance suggests, having used magic to keep herself youthful-looking and beautiful. After he comes back from temporarily being made into a youthful version of himself, Zedd admits that he could do the same, but doesn't since being a youth once was enough for him.
• Vanessa Zeitgeist from the M.I. High episode "Forever Young" is the scientific version of this trope. She transforms herself into a 25 year old with surgery, implants, chemical peels, and an anti-aging formula. In her quest for beauty, Vanessa creates Formula-66. But instead of renewing looks, it regresses the mind.
• Penny Dreadful has Evelyn Poole, who made a Deal with the Devil for supernatural powers and eternal youth. She is also seen bathing in the blood of a murdered young woman, possibly as a part of her beauty regimen.
• Trakeena from Power Rangers Lost Galaxy was like this in the first half of the series; in one episode, she ordered the Monster of the Week to steal the beauty from the female inhabitants of Terra Venture to enhance her own. While that failed plot seemed like a one-shot deal, the conclusion of the episode quickly turned this into a major plot point, when her father Scorpius offered her a cocoon that would increase her powers exponentially through evolution - but cause her to shed her human form. Trakeena wasn't willing to make that trade and ran away rather than do it. Eventually, however, after Taking a Level in Badass on her own (thanks in part to Villimax) she dropped this attitude and took over after Scorpius's death, and eventually did use the thing when facing defeat (unfortunately, while she was no longer vain after that, it pretty much cost her every bit of humanity she ever might have had, making her a cold-blooded demon who was worse than ever — to be fair, Deviot had, as a last resort, dragged Trakeena into the cocoon beforehand and wound up merging with her, making her far more evil that she'd been prior).
• The power of the Smallville Freak Of The Week in "Redux" was to absorb Life Energy to retain her youth. Like most villains with this ability, Rapid Aging eventually caught up with her.
• Supernatural:
  • A Fourth Season episode features a six hundred-year-old witch who has returned in the body of a sexy high schooler who dresses as a Cheerleader for Halloween.
  • Subverted in a Season 5 episode with a beautiful woman who has stayed perpetually young thanks to her warlock boyfriend but who has come to find the arrangement unnatural and wants to grow old and die.
  • Rowena is hundreds of years old but still manages to look relatively young and attractive.
• Both versions of T-Bag, though it's Tallulah who's the more directly vain of the two, with Tabatha being more power-crazed. Tallulah Bag will preface her name with "the great" when introducing herself and has increasingly outlandish tastes when it comes to clothes and hairstyles. Slightly subverted, as in fact she is around 500 years old (according to the book The Amazing Adventures of T-Bag) and has no magical way of staying young even though she constantly drinks enchanted tea. In quite a few episodes feminine charm fails to work on people. She has to resort to the sorcery part instead.
• An episode of The Twilight Zone (1985) has a woman stealing her daughter’s youth using magic and impersonating her in high school. It is pretty much the same plot as the Buffy episode that introduces Amy.

Pinball

• The "Tower" table of Ruiner Pinball puts a good amount of focus on the sexiness of the Evil Sorceress.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Gender-Inverted with the magus Imanitos Mendax, an amoral, hedonistic, womanizing Man of Wealth and Taste who even designed his Longevity Treatment to preserve his good looks more effectively than his health.
• Blackbirds RPG: The Plague of Beauty was once a beautiful mortal woman, who joined the Oligarchs largely because she hoped that the immortality gained from usurping the gods would afford her eternal youth. Among her servants are the Rose Witches, women hand-picked by her for their vanity who serve her without question in return for otherworldly and eternal beauty.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In the Ravenloft adventure Feast of Goblyns, the main villainess is a priestess who'd attempted to make herself more beautiful using corrupt sacrificial rituals. She'd already had a Charisma of 17, so must've been extremely vain not to have contented herself with being more attractive than almost any other human alive.
  • 5th Edition: Particularly vain men and women sometimes strike bargains with sinister powers to gain eternal youth, beauty, and immortality. They get what they wanted, for a time, but such bargains carry a heavy price: eventually, a powerful curse kicks in, and the person is forever transformed into a Medusa.
• Exalted has a divine equivalent in the form of the storm mothers. Unlike the other examples, there's no way to make one of them pretty, and their natural appearance is utterly hideous. They express their vanity by making it so that no woman prettier than themselves (which is pretty much every mortal woman) can crew a ship in the West without calling down their wrath. They do provide a third option, however, allowing women to become the "third-gender" Tya if they want to take to the sea.
  • They also find it hard to affect red-haired women, due to the existence of a more powerful deity of sail who happens to be a redhead.
• Liliana Vess in Magic: The Gathering. She was once an "original" Planeswalker, essentially an immortal, godlike being, and had eternal youth to go with it. However, when a Cosmic Retcon depowered the Planeswalkers and reduced them to being "merely" very powerful universe-hopping mages, she lost her power and began to age. When she, as an old lady, made a Deal with the Devil (four demons, to be exact) to regain her powers, you can bet she asked for her youth and beauty back as part of the deal.
• Pathfinder has the eternally young Queen Sorshen who was the Runelord of Lust, indulging in that particular sin and drawing enormous power through that path. While all the other runelords created monuments to themselves in the form of busts, Sorshen was vainer than the others and had full-body statues of herself placed throughout her kingdom.
• Warhammer:
  • The Hag Queens of the Dark Elves, notably Morathi and Hellebron, who regularly bathe in blood to keep their eternal youth. Particularly relevant for Hellebron, who's only able to get a few days of youth every year. Morathi, on the other hand, invented the process and retains her beauty at all times. The Hag Queens are a bit of a borderline case in that, except Morathi, they're not actually sorceresses, but rather frenzied blood cultists who worship a god of warfare and murder. In fact, they actually despise magic users — Morathi is just so powerful and influential she can flout the rules as she pleases. They still get the magical benefits of bloodbath-renewed youth, though, and the actual sorceresses of the Dark Elves play the trope straight as an arrow.
  • In some versions of the background, Neferata stole Nagash's elixir of immortality to maintain her youth and beauty. A botched formula gave her her wish but also turned her into the first vampire. Her progeny, the Lahmian vampire bloodline, also qualify for the trope.
  • A rare male example is to be had in Sigvald the Magnificent, although his vanity is preserved chiefly by being the spoiled favourite of an indulgent dark god, rather than by his own magic. Narcissistic vanity and (justified) arrogance is pretty much all there is to Sigvald, he died when a battle had left him with a scar, and he was so distracted (despite the scar being temporary) that he didn't notice the troll king sneaking up on him.
• In Warhammer 40,000, many of the Dark Eldar are ancient even by Eldar standards and maintain the appearance of youth and vitality with their tech. Daemons and psykers can see the Dark Eldar for what they truly are: withered old monsters.

Theatre

• Deconstructed with the Witch in Into the Woods. She trades her powers in to get back her (rightfully) good looks, only to massively regret it later. She's not so much Ax-Crazy over being ugly as she is weary of being treated like a freak.

Video Games

• In Archon, while they're designed (in the original version) to be fairly blank slates to let players feel free to use Light Is Not Good and Dark Is Not Evil, the iconic pieces for the Light and Dark spellcasters are still visually suggestive. And in the piece descriptions, we have "An ancient man of vast supernatural power" contrasted with "The equal of the old Wizard only in power, the eternally young and ever beautiful Sorceress is his counterpart in all ways." Make of it what you will.
• In Banjo-Kazooie, Gruntilda the witch kidnaps the protagonist's little sister to use her for the "sucking the youth out of younger characters" method. She only pulls it off if the player gets a game over or quits.
• In Castle of Illusion, the witch Mizrabel envies Minnie Mouse's beauty. Mizrabel kidnaps Minnie in order to rob her of it, which she partially succeeds in doing.
• Flea of Chrono Trigger, the primary magic user in the Mystic army, is obsessed with beauty, stating that "beauty is power" when confronted by the heroes. However, despite all appearances, Flea isn't quite a perfect match.
• The evil queen in Curse of Enchantia kidnaps Brad (the player's character) as a final ingredient for her spell of constant youth.
• Morrigan in Dragon Age: Origins seems to be one of these, though she's a little young for it to be apparent. She's certainly very concerned with being seen as sexy, and she's got the rest of the personality associated with this.
  • Her mother Flemeth, however, fits this trope in the body surfing variety.
  • The Baroness of the Blackmarsh from Awakening was this in life and death. While alive she abducted and murdered the children of her peasants to use their blood in rituals to preserve her youth. After she was killed, she maintained her beautiful form while a spirit even after becoming a Pride Demon.
• A factor in Lobelia's Face–Heel Turn in Duel Savior Destiny long ago was that she was bitter over how ugly her scarring was. When it finally came down to fight against her former ally, she ended the fight by stealing her more beautiful body.
• Edea in Final Fantasy VIII, but only when she is under Ultimecia's control; otherwise, she tends to dress in a very simple, modest fashion; played straight with Ultimecia, at least in her normal human form; averted with Rinoa and averted big-time with Adel.
• Kuja of Final Fantasy IX is another male character along the lines of this (though his gender isn't necessarily obvious at first glance.) He's quite vain about his appearance and while he doesn't specifically pursue eternal youth, this is because he mistakenly believes he's already immortal; upon learning that he isn't, he has a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum because he can't bear the thought of the world existing without him.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Aversa from Fire Emblem: Awakening is a curious case, in that she's always shown as The Vamp but her actual Vain Sorceress traits only actually appear when she has a Heel–Face Turn and the player not only recruits her but deploys her in Hot Spring Scramble.
  • Nuibaba from Fire Emblem Gaiden not only gets prettied up in the remake Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, but becomes this. She abducts and sacrifices "young and comely" (read: cute) Rigelian girls to keep herself young and pretty, and now she wants to sacrifice either Alm or Celica because as Brand Bearers, they might "grant" her immortality if they're made into human sacrifices.
• An odd male, more or less benign version: Anji Mito from Guilty Gear, who greatly dislikes the mere idea of growing older. One of his GGX endings has That Man offering him the chance to join him and get his wish to stay young forever. Anji's reply is not shown, but this is later confirmed to be his canon GGX ending as he's shown working for That Man.
• A minor villain in Icewind Dale is a witch living near a village of skinners and furriers. Their primary source of income is mink fur. She turns children into... minks, somehow using that energy to remain not only young and beautiful but immortal.
• In the Fan Remake of King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne, Hagatha's motivation is that she's a wannabe Vain Sorceress. She's a hideous old hag who wants to be young and beautiful but hasn't managed to find a way to accomplish that yet.
• Kirby: Triple Deluxe: Queen Sectonia is obsessed with beauty and used her magic powers to alter her appearance to become more beautiful before the events of the game. However, she wasn't always like this. She was once a kind and fair ruler until Dark Meta Knight corrupted her.
• Nintendo Wars: Kindle from Advance Wars: Dual Strike is somehow able to do this via the Black Crystals, which leach minerals and supplies from the planet.
• This is also a running gag for the sorceress Marjolly, from the Nippon Ichi Marl Kingdom games (Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure) and cameos in Disgaea. Same with "Beauty Queen" Etna.
• Deneb from Ogre Battle willfully staves off aging using underhanded means. Allegedly. And if you're female, she taunts you and then tells you you'll get wrinkles if you frown. Averted in the same game by the great witch Mango, who is 120 years old and entitled "The Great and Beautiful", even though she looks like any other old witch in the game.
  • So allegedly that Deneb's "death quote" in both Tactics Ogre games is more irritation than despair, and you can have her possess suitable hosts multiple times after dying in Tactic Ogre: Knight of Lodis.
• Planescape: Torment:
  • Even though Fall-From-Grace probably isn't of this type (despite being able to change her shape to appear as she desires), and as a Succubus there's no reason to think that her true form would be anything but beautiful, Action Girl Annah frequently uses the idea to try to insult her. Pointedly, she does not try to hide the wings that mark her as a demon.
  • Ravel, on the other hand, is a subversion; she keeps her ancient, shriveled hag appearance despite the fact that changing her looks is as easy as breathing to her. She does assume the appearances of your female companions to tempt you and she reveals that she actually was three specific people you encountered at certain places in the Hive but resumes her old self after that. The especially interesting thing about Ravel is that while she does have extensive shapeshifting powers when she assumes the appearances of Grace and Annah it's only an illusion that doesn't extend past sight, as is revealed when she kisses you. Maybe she's making a comment on the nature of beauty.
• Kyogoku Maria from Sengoku Basara 4, Azai Nagamasa's older half-sister, is quite haughty and frequently uses her enchantments to enhance her beauty.
• Spyro: Year of the Dragon has The Sorceress, the game's Big Bad. She is extremely vain, as shown in Enchanted Towers, where she had a statue of herself built, then complained that it was too ugly, despite it being an accurate likeness as well as her true plan of murdering 150 dragon hatchlings for their wings so she can become immortal.
• In Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet, Butterscotch uses her magic to make herself look thinner and prettier to others. This backfires when her constant use of magic to maintain this illusion completely saps her powers at the exact time she and Syrup get trapped inside an ice cave and Syrup ends up seeing her true appearance. As she's more of a friendly nuisance to Syrup than evil, though, she learns her lesson and stops magically altering her appearance after this incident.
• Sophia Leigh from Tomb Raider III is a modernized version. She's Really 700 Years Old, a beauty-obsessed owner of a cosmetics company and of a magic sceptre, powered by a neatly-carved piece of Magic Meteor. It's implied that she uses that sceptre to meddle with her company's experiments, and picks the best results for herself. In the script, she's described as "a woman who pays much attention to her looks".
• Touhou Project's Byakuren Hijiri was once a youkai-fighting Buddhist nun, who secretly took pity on her targets, teaching them virtue and releasing them where they could not harm humans. Then her little brother Myouren died and Byakuren, horrified by the reality of growing old and dying, sold her humanity to become a Magician youkai herself so that she would remain young and beautiful forever. To this day, while she's still an All-Loving Hero to youkai, she specializes in body-enhancement spells. Akyuu also notes that magician-immortality doesn't come with any de-aging, so Byakuren's first act upon becoming a youkai was to grant herself youth out of vanity.
• Melody, one of the Prophets in Wild ARMs 3 strives to become a demon so that she can stay beautiful forever. One of the heroes, Clive Winslet, mocks her for her vanity whenever they meet, and she carries a grudge against him for it.
• World of Warcraft: Queen Azshara. Her in-universe nickname is even "the Vainglorious".

Webcomics

• Salth from The Dementia of Magic is a borderline case. She's not evil, nor is her youth Powered by a Forsaken Child, but always surrounds herself with an illusion spell to look young.
• In El Goonish Shive Nioi, a human-skunk chimera sorceress, is a benign version — she played with cosmetic use of shapeshifting magic, changing her skin color and making herself slightly younger. Maybe because of her rather obvious crush on Lord Tedd. She also claimed as empirical knowledge that a younger soul in a physically older body is a bad idea, but it's just fine if vice versa.
• The double standard is fairly well pointed out early on in Errant Story; female magic-users that show the slightest sign of aging are more or less expected to dedicate some of their power to maintain their appearance. The main character hates this expectation, mainly because she's largely resistant to such magics.
  • Said main character's mother sympathetic one, who's doing it so she'll still be at attractive to the main character's father, an immortal elf. Too bad he's a Jerkass who doesn't care about her or his daughter.
• Mottom from Kill Six Billion Demons uses magical peaches to temporarily reverse her aging and make herself young and beautiful (or revert back to a child) depending on how much of it she eats at a time. She never goes out in public without turning herself young, as she feels her role as queen depends on her remaining ever-young and beautiful in front of her subjects. True to form, her magic is Powered by a Forsaken Child: The peaches are grown from a tree that sprouted from the corpse of her murdered husband, and requires constant Human Sacrifice of virgins to keep producing fruit. Mottom goes through dozens of young women every single time she regresses her age.
• Camilia from Slimy Thief wanted to become a sorceress so she could give herself a curvy body with large breasts. She tried to join an order of witches to learn magic but quits after being selected to join when she learns that one of the requirements is that she gives up what she most desires, so she wouldn't be allowed to change her body using magic.
• The Specialists: Die Hexe is a 1940s Nazi supervillain who wastes most of her magic on glamour spells. She's in her sixties and acts like The Vamp, so this was inevitable.
• Greta Gravity from Spinnerette is a very chubby supervillainess with gravity manipulation powers. Despite her chubbiness, she still has very shapely breasts and an hourglass figure which the title character speculates might be because Greta's using her powers on herself as a makeshift corset and push-up bra. Greta neither confirms nor denies it, but in a later issue it's confirmed when she loses her powers and her breasts instantly become less perky.

Web Original

• Jynleeviyah the Red in Hello, from the Magic Tavern, while not a sorceress (they are completely different to wizards) makes a truce with the Dark Lord in exchange for improving her skin, and agrees to help Arnie with his citizenship trial in exchange for him getting some Oil of Ulay if he ever makes it back to Earth.
• While not a villain, Hamburger Pattie in the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions has admitted to using magic to create her sexy figure.

Western Animation

• Lady Bane, one of the villainesses of Adventures of the Gummi Bears is like this. She remains young (be more than 100 years old) by sucking the youth of girls every certain amount of time, otherwise she became old very fast.
• Ben 10: Alien Force: A Rare Male Example, Morningstar is a mana vampire who prefers seducing female victims until they become dependent on him and ultimately end up resembling zombies. When Gwen turns the tables on him, his other victims follow her lead and drain their energy back, reducing Michael to the same withered appearance he'd inflicted on them. His later appearances involve him wearing a mask, calling himself Darkstar, and trying to find a girl with enough Mana to restore his handsome face because now the average girl isn't enough anymore. Sometimes he succeeds by draining Gwen or Charmcaster, but he always fails to keep it and goes back to being ugly.
• Spectra in Danny Phantom feeds off the misery of teenagers to restore her own youth.
• Justice League:
  • The show's version of Morgan Le Fay drains youth from random Muggles, as shown most prominently in "A Knight of Shadows". However, it's not really a case of vanity, since her costume covers up her entire body except for her hands — it seems to be mostly for the benefit of her son, Mordred, whom she cast a spell on to grant eternal life and eternal youth. Evidently, it fixed him at that age and can't be broken or altered without causing him to instantly turn into a withered old man.
  • Circe from "This Little Piggy" is another variant not centered on physical beauty. According to Medusa, Circe was always jealous of her cousins, the Sirens, and one of the first things she does once freed from the Underworld is go to a night club to prove her singing is as good as theirs.
• Inverted by classic Looney Tunes character Witch Hazel, who is very vain and obsessive about her ugliness. In Broom-Stick Bunny, she constantly consults her magic mirror to ensure she's still the "ugliest of all" and becomes jealous when Bugs shows up at her house on Halloween wearing a witch mask more hideous than she is. In the same cartoon, she's tricked by Bugs into drinking a potion that actually turns her into a beautiful woman, which causes her to Freak Out.
• My Little Pony 'n Friends:
  • In "The Glass Princess", the pig sorceress Porcina wants to turn everything into glass so she can see her reflection everywhere.
  • In "Somnambula", the titular witch is motivated by the wish to regain her youth and beauty, which she achieves by stealing those of others. Whenever she's in her old, ugly form she keeps her face covered, and when her spell is broken and she revers to normal she runs away while covering her face in shame.
• Eda Clawthorne from The Owl House is a rare non-villainous example. She's the most powerful witch in the Boiling Isles, is still very "foxy" despite her premature aging from her curse, and she is very well aware, if not proud, of both of those facts.
• Spoofed with Hogatha in The Smurfs (1981); many of her beauty-related schemes are for her to "retain" her beauty even if they meant someone getting hurt or killed. The joke is she's already hideous.
• Played with in W.I.T.C.H.. While second season Big Bad Nerissa starts out as a 60+ hag with almost viper-like features, as soon as she has some power to spare she turns into a 20-something diva and casts a love spell on the school. Though in this case, the regaining of youth is presented as more of a side effect of Nerissa's power boost (albeit one she's certainly pleased with) rather than her primary goal. Power itself is her number one priority, hence her being willing to Cast from Hit Points in the first place, which had made her look even older than she naturally would have.

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