So Beautiful, It's A Curse - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): So Beautiful Its A Curse

Why couldn’t Satan have made me less beautiful?
—Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way

A very specific form of Blessed With Suck that comes up with depressing regularity. An admittedly attractive character (almost always female) remarks on how their beauty is a drawback. Whether it be as a failed attempt at being humble, offering a "sour grapes" solution to appease other people, or because their beauty actually is a severe drawback, they decide to spend some time Wangsting about it. Usually, this makes the character come across as either thankless or otherwise disconnected from reality, making them a bit unsympathetic.

Seldom actually shown with a realistic amount of the Green Eyed Monster making life miserable.

Women whose lives actually have been rendered miserable by their looks are seldom shown whining about it — which makes them more sympathetic by itself. A woman's victim in Fairest Of Them All seldom curses her luck, for instance. Partly, no doubt, because she's too busy trying to survive.

Now usually used for parody or specifically to evoke eye-rolling. Sadly, it still gets used a lot in amateur fiction and is practically synonymous with Mary Sue. If the beauty comes with attractive nonhuman features that the character may see as "monstrous", this is a case of But Your Wings Are Beautiful.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Yukinari from Girls Bravo. Although most of the girls in the series tend to beat him up even when he's not doing anything wrong, his feminine features have attracted the attention of Kirie, Miharu, and Lisa, (who's absolutely crazy about him, and has basically stalked and tried to rape him several times).
- Kirie too. Her overall prettiness (not to mention her Gag Boobs) have gotten her not one, but two psychotic female admirers who refuse to take "No" for an answer. She also tends to be a favorite target of local pervert Fukuyama. Plus, sometimes she can't even walk down the street without being bombarded by guys who fall in love with her on sight. And yes, this once included a perverted old man and a little kid.
Ranma from Ranma One Half. Although to a certain extent justified, in that he really loves Akane and she always hates it when women are near him because she feels like he is cheating on her.
Shungo Ninomiya from Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun. He's harassed on a regular basis by a majority of the girls at his school who think that his "troubled face" is very cute. Yeah... Not to mention the sheer number of guys in one episode who swooned over his good looks, and crowded around him, complete with unwanted touching...Or when Reika tried to kiss him, among other things, while he was sleeping. Also, Reika's alternate personality once lured Shungo to a private location where she actually attempted to rape him...
Sasuke Uchiha's Bishonen looks coupled with the fact that All Girls Want Bad Boys have gotten him hoards of admirers, all who blush and Squee at the sight of him, which he finds incredibly annoying and has no patience for it. The worst of them is Karin, who kept one of his sweat-drenched shirts for herself, and planned on "ravaging him after everyone went to bed".
Sousuke Sagara from Full Metal Panic anyone? Apparently, Sousuke's good looks caused Gauron to stop in his tracks when he first laid eyes on him, and he tried to pick him up - this being when Sousuke was twelve. Sousuke, having experience knowing a perverted admirer when he sees one, promptly rebuffs him. As a result, Gauron becomes incapable of forgetting Sousuke, and becomes a creepy Stalker With A Crush towards him. To further this trope, even since the beginning when Sousuke was very young and with fellow guerillas, his looks caused him some trouble. Although he himself admits that it was nice that he received gentler treatment from the fellow guerillas, he was constantly worrying that they might all rape him while he's unguarded in his sleep. And even when he's 16, he's still worried that he might get kidnapped and raped while he's in the bad neighborhood in Hong Kong. His fear of this extends to women as well - namely about Tessa, who constantly tries to molest him while he's sleeping. He eventually develops a habit of sleeping under the bed, most likely because of his fear that people won't be able to resist doing... things to him otherwise.
While Kyohei from The Wallflower never says anything to the likes of this, he certainly fits the trope. He can't hold a job thanks to constant sexual harassment, he's had a slew of stalkers that eventually drove his family to kick him out, he used to have to be escorted to school to avoid being attacked, it was implied that he had been raped several times by many strangers as a grade-schooler and there was even one time where he was kidnapped off the street by a Host Club for the purpose of selling him to the highest bidder as a sexual slave.
One of Arina Tanemura's one-shot manga stories dealt with this: a girl named Eve who was supposedly stunningly beautiful..and hated it. She was a victim of attempted kidnapping, no girls would talk to her because she was rumored to have stolen a girl's boyfriend, and she never knows if boys are only interested in her for her looks or not. And yet she ''still'' gets beauty treatments and buys cute, expensive clothes (and works part-time jobs to pay for it all!) because "people say a cute girl who isn't fashionable must be a slob."
The lead female character of the manga Telepathic Wanderers hates being beautiful because not only do most men she meets lust after her, but, being psychic (and unable to control her power), she's forced to watch every fantasy a man has about her in her presence. (And, in keeping with what seems to be a theme with this trope, she also almost gets raped at one point in volume 1.)
Parodied in Princess Tutu. A character named Femio believes that he's so beautiful, it's a sin, because it causes every woman (and a few men) who sees him to fall maddeningly in love with him—so much so that they can barely stand to be around him! It's SUCH a sin, he constantly "repents" for it by allowing himself to be trampled by a bull called by his faithful servant. However, it turns out that he's so egotistical and so bizarre with his self-imposed punishments that everyone hates him and do everything they can to avoid him, and he's too obsessed with himself to see it.
The male lead of Koukou Debut received at least one present or letter (love and hate) a day in elementary school; in middle school was complained about by college guys and girls' parents; and once caused the girls in his class to divide into two teams to fight over him.
Fumio Usui in Karin has this problem, which makes it very difficult to hold a job because of the inevitable sexual harassment. Which she strongly resists.
- In the Ren's anime backstory, his boarding school roommate had this problem too.
Imma Youjo is an nontraditional take on Hentai that explores the hardships of a woman who is so beautiful and sexy that "Rape!" is the only thing all men (and some women) can think of when seeing her.
Lampshaded in Fushigi Yuugi as Hotohori is prone to saying this about himself.
Tamaki in Ouran High School Host Club is keenly aware of his own beauty and perfection. His image song Guilty Beauty Love starts with the line "My sin is that God has made me too beautiful."
Being something of a melodramatic diva, Bulma from Dragon Ball thinks that she's this — though whether this is true is up for debate. For example, she attributes her lack of Nimbus Privileges to being "so beautiful that it's a sin."
Ko Kijin in Saiunkoku Monogatari is so beautiful that when he took the examination to qualify for government office, his looks distracted the other candidates so much that only he and two other people - both friends of his who were already accustomed to his beauty - were able to pass the exams, and thirty officials had to be fired for forgetting to ring the bell to signal the end of the exam period. He eventually took to wearing a mask constantly in order to hide his face, and even the threat of having him take off his mask during court is enough to cause chaos; when he actually takes it off, it entrances anyone who looks at him and sends several men into hysterics.

Comic Books

One of the specials in J Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars is a woman whose power is that she appears to everyone who sees her as the most beautiful woman they can imagine. This gets her lots of unwelcome attention and means that no one sees the real her, instead just being focused on their own lusts and such.
In DC Comics, Power Girl sometimes complains because everyone only pays attention to her ... attributes. Though perhaps she'd have less of a problem if she covered over the peek-a-boo(b) window in the front of her costume.
Riley Freeman of The Boondocks.
- To be more specific Riley struggles with making himself look like a thug because he's "cursed with cuteness". Something similar happened to Huey when he began ranting and an old lady ignored the whole rant because she thought he was so adorable.
The Legion Of Superheroes had a minor character named Charma who had an uncontrollable power to make all men love and want her and all women insanely jealous of her. She got put into the general population of a prison and was killed, all for the purpose of making her Mad Scientist boyfriend go on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge against life, the universe, and everything, starting with trying to kill the entire Earth.
Used in The Beano as an inversion of Bash Street Kid Plug's ugliness, in which the Kids have to try and "make a sow's ear out of a silk purse" by making a guest character who's so handsome he makes people faint, more like Plug.
In the Cast Full Of Gay comic strip Chelsea Boys, ridiculously gorgeous, muscled young hunk Sky is a victim of this. He finds it hard to be taken seriously for his art because everyone is fawning over his hotness, but he maintains an overall cheery demeanor even when his roommate points out that some people just give him extra favors cause they want to get in his pants.

Fairy Tales and Mythology

Helen of Troy, from Greek Mythology, was "the face that launched a thousand ships" and kicked off the ten-year Trojan War between her lover and her husband. A war in which she did not have fun; making this one Older Than Dirt.
In Puddocky, a witch transforms a young woman under her care into a toad because three princes start a quarrel over the young woman's beauty.
In Donkeyskin, the queen makes the king promise not marry until he found "a woman more beautiful and better formed than myself." In due course, the king does find such a woman: his own daughter. She has to flee to escape.
- Similarly in All-Kinds-Of-Fur and The She-Bear.
Deirdre was an Irish princess whose legendary beauty made her life suck so much (kings fought over her) that she is given the epithet "Deirdre of the Sorrows".
Psyche was so beautiful that Venus—the goddess of beauty—got jealous, and sent her son Cupid to make her fall in love with something loathsome.
- Of course, Psyche was still so beautiful that Cupid, the god of attraction, fell in love with her upon seeing her, refused to carry out Venus' intended revenge plot, and took Psyche to live in luxury. Psyche ruins paradise by ignoring Cupid's warning not to look at him at night and burning Cupid with lamp oil during a botched assassination attempt, but, after a decent amount of suffering, Cupid still loves her and convinces Jupiter to elevate Psyche to immortality.
Andromeda had a similar story to Psyche, with a little help from her Stage Mom, Cassiopeia, who bragged incessantly about her daughter's beauty.
Narcissus, this trope's most famous victim.
- Of course, most of the stories that use this trope don't make the curse of it wanting to Screw Yourself.
Hyacinthus was another famous victim from Greek mythology. He was so beautiful that two gods fell in love with him, Apollo and Zephyrus. Zephyrus ended up killing him in a jealous rage.

Fan Fic

Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, heroine of masterly fanfic parody (shh, yes it is, it must be) My Immortal is propositioned by everyone she meets, leading to the, uh, immortal lines:
"Yeah but everyone is in love with me! Like Snape and Loopin took a video of me naked. Hargrid says he’s in love with me. Vampire likes me and now even Snaketail is in love with me! I just wanna be with you ok Draco! Why couldn’t Satan have made me less beautiful?... Im good at too many things! WHY CAN'T I JUST BE NORMAL? IT’S A FUCKING CURSE!"
The hero(ine) of The World Well Lost mentions falling victim to something like this, although it's not due to hir being brain-breakingly beautiful, so much as it's due to the fact that s/he's beautiful and transgendered, and some insecure straight guys react badly to this.

Film

Parodied in A Knights Tale, Jocelyn is chided by a bishop for giggling with her handmaiden over the antics of 'Sir Ulric'. The following exchange ensues:
Bishop: Does this not shock you, ladies!
Jocelyn: Sir, I only laugh, just to keep from weeping.
Bishop: Beauty is such a curse. Pray your years come swiftly, pray your beauty fades, so you may better serve God.
Jocelyn: I do. I pray for it all the time. Why, God, did you curse me with this face?
- She says this, one notes, in a perfect monotone. The priest is mollified.
A slight variation is hilariously invoked in Mean Girls. The high school girls have been building a trust exercise: they read out apologies for all the bitchy things they have done, then fall backwards to be caught by the other girls. The simultaneously vain and deeply insecure Gretchen Wieners actually utters the following 'apology' completely without irony (Needless to say the other girls do not all rush to catch her when she falls backwards):
"I'm sorry that people are so jealous of me... but I can't help it that I'm so popular."
Parodied in Undercover Brother.
White She Devil: "I know what it feels like to be discriminated against...they look at me, and all they see are my full breasts and my narrow waist that tapers to my pert backside. It's just not fair."
Done straight in The Ten Commandments. An Egyptian overseer lusts after a female Hebrew slave, leading the other Hebrews to comment about how beauty is a curse.
Legally Blonde plays it straight, but it's surprisingly realistic, as Elle not only finds out she only got Callahan's internship because she's pretty, but finds him coming on to her with the implication that if she doesn't acquiesce he'll screw her in other ways. Of course, she winds up totally kicking ass anyway. It's played up a bit more in the musical.
Stupefyin' Jones in Li'l Abner. See for yourself! An unusual occurrence of weaponized beauty.
Bully the Kid complains of this early in Chinese Odyssey 2002, as he feels it makes him less intimidating as a bully.

Literature

Anne Of Green Gables had a version of this, where her friend Leslie was trapped in a marriage to a man she hated, ostensibly because of the curse of her irresistible beauty. (He had coerced her into marriage by threatening to foreclose on a mortgage and throw her mother out of her home.)
Another male version of this is Joseph from The Bible. He was "a goodly person and well favored", and his master's wife conceived a passion for him. Her repeated advances being refused, she tried to coerce him; when that failed, she went to her husband and accused Joseph of trying to rape her (effectively accusing him of what she wanted him to do in the first place), and Joseph was thrown into prison.
- One could make the case that this was one of the reasons his father favored him over his brothers. Aside from being the son of Rachel, the second wife and the one Joseph's father truly loved, he inherited his mother's good looks, making his beauty indirectly the reason he became a slave as well.
The book version of The Princess Bride sort of deals with this. Buttercup laments that everyone puts her on a pedestal, it's such a hassle to maintain such beauty, nobody thinks she's smart, etc. Apparently being the most beautiful woman in the world isn't all peaches and cream. The Prince's plan to marry and then kill her, as a means to enrage the people and start a war, does back this up a little. '- everybody had told her she was probably the most beautiful woman in the world. Now she was going to the richest and most powerful as well. Don't expect too much from life, Buttercup told herself, be happy with what you have.'
There's a book called Cloud Of Sparrows about missionaries going to Japan in which Emily, the 17-year-old heroine (no, wait, only nearly 17) is so beautiful (and such a raving Mary Sue for whom even the author seems to have a perverse contempt) that she's apparently a rape-magnet. So after she's been raped by her step-dad and nearly raped by some family friends' sons and leered at by every man she meets, she hates "her accursed beauty" (and that's a direct quote) and longs to escape from it. So she goes to Japan, where no one's seen a Western woman before and everyone finds her not just odd-looking but extravagantly hideous — yay! And she spends the whole plot trying desperately to stay in Japan rather than return to a land where she'll be considered beautiful again. Even when she nearly gets raped there too.
Florimell in The Faerie Queene doesn't complain but has a right to. After fleeing from three guys who try to rape her, a hyena-like monster, and a witch who clones her, she's kidnapped by Proteus and thrown in his dungeon until she agrees to sleep with him (which she adamantly refuses to the end). The author feels deeply sorry for all the troubles he puts her through... all because she's so beautiful.
In Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy, when Burrich gets around to discussing his backstory, he talks about his grandmother, who was a slave in the Chalced States. Apparently (paraphrased) "Beauty is the worst trait a slave can possess. Her mistresses hated her and her masters raped her." It seems like a fairly realistic version of this trope.
Justified in the book Five Children and It, where the kids get a wish to "be as beautiful as the day" but nobody recognizes them, and they aren't even allowed into their own house. (Fortunately, the wish has a built-in time limit.)
A bizarre and creepy version shows up in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which one character is so beautiful that it is physically painful to look at her. The problem is solved by cutting up her face with clamshells.
Referenced in CS Lewis's Narnia book Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy has the opportunity to read a spell from a Wizard's book that would give her supernatural beauty. The book came complete with handy illustrations showing people worshipping her, then turning on each other, fighting wars over her, and so on. Lucy almost reads it anyway, but after an illustration of an angry Lion fills the page, she changes her mind.
Rosalie Hale from Twilight. Her beauty led her to get bashed and gang-raped as a human.... By her fiance and his friends, no less.
- Not to mention Bella, who is attacked by a gang of rapists only to be saved by her True Love. It's actually inverted for Bella: she is so lovely and pale and beautiful that she has several guys in class suing for her prom date, but she spends most of the books complaining about how ugly she is.
Parodied in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Maskerade: the thin, beautiful, brainless, talentless Christine, when questioned about her scanty breakfast, tells the fat but highly talented Agnes, "It's lucky for you, you can eat whatever you want." Agnes tries to be charitable but "deep down inside, [she] thought a rude word." Of course, the book goes on to say that while being a talentless beauty can be a curse, being a talent with no beauty can be a worse curse.
- And in Thud! Tawneee, so beautiful that Sally and Angua (no slouches themselves in the looks department) feel stirrings of envy at her attractiveness, suffers from "Jerk Syndrome", and figuring this out allows them to overcome their jealousy. She is so beautiful that most men "can't believe she would notice a guy like me", so they don't approach her for fear of rejection. Which leads her to think something is wrong with her, and date pathetic losers...the kind of people who are used to rejection. On top of that, she is "thicker than a yard of lard", and doesn't think she's very attractive at all.
- And yet it's Nobby who dumps her...after Angua cleared things up for Tawneee.
Male example: Lord Byron's Alternate Character Interpretation of Don Juan (and Lord Byron himself, too, for that matter).
Karen from John Steakley's Armor, whose beauty scares almost all men away except for those (her step-father, many superior officers in Fleet, etc) who rape her and get away with it because the juries are so awed by her that they forgive the men for buckling under the irresistable temptation.
In Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, one of the early tales is about a Babylonian princess, Alatiel, who is so beautiful that no man (aside, thankfully, from her father and his loyal knights) can lay eyes on her without immediately contriving to know her in the Biblical sense. As result, she ends up becoming the mistress of some nine different men in the space of a few years, each of whom killed her previous liaison in order to claim her.
Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, is a sort of Grimmified novelization of Donkeyskin. The princess is imprisoned, brutalized, raped, and impregnated by her father; after she escapes, the subsequent Convenient Miscarriage nearly kills her.)
- While she never actually remarks on it, she does panic when her nursemaid tells her she looks so much like her mother, who had been called 'the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms'. She knows there's something really wrong with her father, even if she doesn't know what it is, and really doesn't want him to have any reason to pay her attention. (It doesn't help that her mother made the king promise not to marry any woman less beautiful than her; that makes the princess's resemblance to her mother a little squicky to more people than the princess herself, even if nobody will acknowledge it.)
A.S. Byatt's novel Possession features Maude Bailey, who as a professor of feminist literature finds her beauty such a curse that she keeps her head shaved for awhile, then ties her hair up in tight braids and a scarf to fend off the accusations of her peers that she grows and dyes it to please men. Arguably, the book is conscious of this trope (she has an ex-lover who used to traipse around naked and pointedly quote Yeats's 'Your Yellow Hair' at her), but plays it very straight.
Thomas Raith from The Dresden Files is a good incubus. Naturally, he has the (supernatually) good looks one would expect an incubus to have, however he feeds on people via sex, and it can easily lead to Death By Sex, which he is unwilling to do due to being a good person and having made the woman he loved almost suffer that fate. He was also for a while unable to hold a job, as his (mostly) female colleagues would throw themselves at him. Hell, he couldn't even go for a walk without random joggers throwing themselves all over him.
- Which he remedies by pretending to be gay.
Alejandro Dolina, in Crónicas del Ángel Gris ("Chronicles of the Gray Angel") tells a tale of a girl so beautiful that she never had a boyfriend, because every man who glances at her dies at once. To worsen her misery, she has a (mostly ordinary) sister, with lots of boyfriends.
A weird inversion is Remedios The Beauty from One Hundred Years Of Solitude, where her beauty is a curse... for her family and the men who get mesmerized at her. Her family constantly battle to maintain her under protection because, even if she looks like an adult, she has the mental age of a preschool kid, which cause her to do and say things that are genuinely innocent but, to the ones who only see her hot body and pretty face, came out as seductive and provocative. Whatever they try to mitigate her beauty backfires, only increasing her hotness. The poor girl is completely unaware of her own attractiveness or the reactions she provokes, and when people start to die out of love of her (because they were distracted by her beauty) she is unfazed and qualifies them as simple and dumb.
The (initially) antagonist of Justine Larbalestier's How To Ditch Your Fairy isn't especially beautiful, but she has a literal All The Boys Like You fairy which makes her damn near irresistible to anything with XY chromosomes, regardless of sexual orientation; the only thing is, not only is she not all that interested in boys, she's miserably harassed and intimidated by their constant refusal to take "go away" for an answer, and none of the other girls in school will talk to her because they think she must be reveling in the attention from their boyfriends.
In the Wild Cards anthology series, Succubus is a Joker whose mutation causes her to look like the perfect lover for whoever gazes upon her. Her parents pimped her out when she was a child, and her life does not improve from there.
Commander Elli Quinn in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. After getting her face burned off in a space battle, Miles pays for it to be replaced with the best face that 30th century reconstructive surgery can supply. She is initially delighted with her new face, "but the second time a soldier made a pass at me instead of following an order, I knew I definitely had a problem."
Brought up by someone talking to the fey character (whose name I can't recall) in Lyndon Hardy's Riddle of the Seven Realms. She subsequently comes to adopt this trope as her own, and ends up in a relationship with Astron, a demon (albeit a nice one), because he's the only one who she believes can love her for herself.
Examined in Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Step-Sister, a retelling of the Cinderella story. Clara's beauty and charm may have played a part in ruining her family's fortunes. At one point, she says her looks overshadow any other aspect of her personality; Clara is juxtaposed with her stepsister Iris, who, despite being thin and plain, is observant, witty, and enduring.
Tragically used in María Luisa Bombal's short story "La Historia de María Griselda". The titular María Griselda is an incredibly beautiful woman who's just as sweet and gentle as you can expect from a Purity Sue... but her sisters shunned her out of envy as kids, her parents tried to compensate for her cursed beauty by shunning María Griselda and favoring them, the only man brave enough to marry her gradually becomes an alcoholic wreck because he considers himself unworthy of such a beautiful woman, her brother-in-law and her sister-in-law's fiancée can't resist her beauty, and her mother-in-law and Unreliable Narrator of the story was pretty much ready to hate her to death for all the gloom her presence brought. Poor, poor María Griselda.
Luthien in JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion dies earlier than she should because "the flame of the beauty of Luthien as she wore [the Silmaril] was too bright for mortal lands."
- Arguably, the (inanimate) silmarilli counts too. They are jewels that are so beautiful that anyone who sees them are immediately filled with an insatiable lust to possess them. They ended up causing a bloody 1000 year-long war as Melkor(the original Dark Lord), Elves, Dwarves, and Men fought over them. The war ended with a Pyrrhic victory to the Elves and the utter annihilation of a subcontinent of Middle-Earth.
In Philip Pullman's The Shadow In The North there is a character called Lady Mary, described thus:
She had discovered already that her beauty was a curse. It awed people. Even hardened charmers, eligible young men about town, felt uneasy in her presence, clumsy and dirty and tongue-tied. Quite early on in her teens she had felt intuitively that instead of attracting love, she might even helplessly repel it, through being too beautiful.
- Yes, it sounds like Wangst, but the character is surprisingly sympathetic, mainly because she keeps the above thoughts to herself, and her beauty does cause her a lot of personal grief.
Princess Petulia of A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears is so beautiful that any man who sees her face turns to stone. She is forced to wear a veil and later kidnapped by a lonely giant. (She gets a happy ending, though.)
For a rare example of this trope done well, check out Tanith Lee's short story, "Strindberg's Ghost Sonata," in Marvin Kaye's anthology, "The Ghost Quartet."
In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, the title character's female relatives are cursed with beauty, to the point where lust for one of them brought down a small country.
Esmeralda in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. Her beauty is the cause of all the tragic events in the book, including her death.
In Kristin Cashore's novel Fire, the titular protagonist is a "monster", which means she is a type of mutant that looks like a mesmerisingly beautiful human. There are monstrous versions of every species in the area in which she lives, and they all crave the flesh of other monsters. Fire is only seventeen and already has a large number of scars where hungry monsters or jealous/lustful humans tried to attack her. Her father was also a monster and gave all other monsters a bad reputation because of the way he misused his ability to attract people and bring them under his spell. Many people despise Fire because of her father's depraved actions, as well as her own monstrous nature.
Deborah from Dexter has a milder and more realistic version in the first book; she always wanted to be a cop, but nature decided to give her the body of a model. This causes most of her workmates and superiors to disregard her ideas and underestimate her abilities, and being in vice, she ends up on a lot of undercover assignments. This improves when she gets promoted to homicide and doesn't get brought up again.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Master Mind of Mars, Valla Dia, when she finds herself transplanted into an old and ugly body, admits that she enjoyed her beauty, but that it had not been an unmixed blessing, as men had fought and died over her. She is content in this body, which, at least, no one would fight over. Indeed, when Ulysses Paxton offers to have her put in a younger and more beautiful body, she rejects it because of the danger that that body would be sold (since they are in a Mad Scientist's lair and he sells such body transplants).
Somewhat subverted in Richard Purtill's The Mirror of Helen in which a young Helen of Troy complains that no one is interested in her, just her beauty. However when a confidant disguises her with makeup making her look old and plain Helen is honest enough to admit she doesn't like it as much as she thought she would. Later in the book Aphrodite takes away Helen's beauty and she has the pleasure of learning that Menelaus does indeed love her for herself NOT for the 'Face'.
Caroline Lawrence's The Roman Mysteries series; Miriam. Almost every adult male character save pretty much only her own father and that of Flavia is either awestruck when they lay eyes on her and/or is in love with her; but her love is for Flavia's uncle Gaius only. In The Dolphins of Laurentum she laments this and claims she hates being beautiful.

Live Action TV

In Stargate SG 1 at least one minor character uses this trope almost verbatim, with the justification that Goa'uld always want attractive hosts, so being too pretty is more than just a social problem.
Hilariously averted in one episode of Mind Your Language. Danièle admits to Mr Brown that she has a big problem, then proceeds to tell him that five men "are all after the one thing: my body". As it turns out this is not her problem: the problem is that, at one man every day of the week, she gets bored on weekends.
Jenna Morasca of Survivor infamously tried to invoke the trope in one Tribal Council, talking about how she's spent her life feeling like her looks are a disability as they cause people to think she isn't smart {It's not your looks that make 'em think that, honey!). It backfired spectacularly, as she said it while sitting right next to someone who was deaf.
- Another reality show contestant, Audrey Evans of The Apprentice, dove headfirst into this trope when she tearfully declared that she earned everthing she has despite her life sucking because, among other things, girls she encountered growing up hated her for her beauty. Came very close to becoming a walking Mary Sue, but was "saved" by not being a particularly effective Apprentice.
Subverted in Monk. Natalie is talking about using feminine wiles to get information, and makes the comment that her beauty is a gift. Monk finishes her statement, "...and a curse?"^*
^{This is a reference to a running joke wherein Monk describes his obsessive-compulsive disorder as a gift and a curse, since it helps him solve really strange crimes, but prevents him from living a normal life.}
She disagrees.
Parodied in Better Off Ted. Veronica, handling a complaint from a group of black employees, tell them that she, too, knows what it's like to deal with discrimination... and then proceeds to talk about how no one liked her in high school because she was so pretty.
Veronica: If it wasn't for the modeling contracts and the comfort of college boys, I don't know how I would have made it.
From How I Met Your Mother:
Lily: Story of my life. My cuteness interferes with people hearing my message.
One of the patrons of Pushing Daisies' rent-a-friend agency was a woman who struggled to make friends because her beauty made women jealous and men only interested in her for her looks, whereas her friend from the agency was interested in her for...her money. I think it's meant to be a deliberate irony.
Cordelia in Buffy. So much. In "Out of Mind, Out of Sight," she and Buffy bond over this, oddly.
Parodied in This Is Wonderland. When Elliot is trying to chat up the courtroom's Spanish translator, he gets halfway through telling her that her beauty must have been a curse back in South America, before he gets interrupted.
Sierra in {{Dollhouse}} suffers from this: her exotic beauty leads her to be sold to the Dollhouse by a rich well connected man so he can have sex with her whenever he wants, she is also raped while in her blank state and the memories haven't quite left her. Although it's shown that it's just not her beauty but the fact that the men are on pervy power trips when abusing her.
- The fact that her real personality is strong-willed and not likely to have sex with any rich pervy men on power trips probably has something to do with it.
- Echo also has shades of this, her beauty is one reason the Dollhouse spent two years tracking her down as well as the fact she had evidence Rossum was up to illegal stuff. This is probably true for other actives as well.
- Also Whiskey, in that Alpha supposedly carved her up precisely because she outshone Echo. (Or at least, that's his ostensible reason. Could be just as much For The Evulz.)
30 Rock episode "The Bubble". Liz's boyfriend is so handsome that people don't acknowledge his incompetence.
An interesting example occurs in one episode of Jonathan Creek where an ugly character is the one making out beauty to be a curse. He says that because when he and his wife met, they were both fairly ugly, they knew their feelings for each other were real, and not based on superficial aspects.
Izzie Stevens from Greys Anatomy admits to being this. (Sort of).

Music

There was a Spongebob Squarepants CD, "The Best Day Ever", in which Squidward sang that his beauty was a curse.
- Which did become an actual plot in an episode (see below)
Done more seriously and convincingly with Emilie Autumn's "Thank God I'm Pretty", which is about the impositions made upon pretty women.

Tabletop Games

Played hilariously straight in Dungeons And Dragons: The Nymph, a fey in the 3rd Edition Monster Manual, is so beautiful, looking at one can blind or kill. She can, however, turn it on and off. (In Second Edition, whether the nymph killed or blinded was based on whether she was naked or clothed, respectively, and couldn't be turned off voluntarily.)
- She can turn it on, eh?
- The above being based on actual Greek Mythology.
  - In Nodwick (which is based on 2nd edition), the party once runs into an evil nymph who tries to kill them by disrobing. Nodwick and Piffany look away; Arthax and Yeagar comment that they've "never enjoyed succeeding a saving throw that much before".
In GURPS, good looks give you a reaction bonus. However, the highest levels of good looks can give you a reaction penalty if the other character already has good reason to dislike you.
- Better yet if you have the highest level of Appearance possible and add the Terror enhancement, people who look at you will scream and run or go insane just as if your appearance were monstrous.
  - The same thing happens if you try to use magic to improve your Appearance above Transcendent.
In Scion, Epic Appearance comes in two forms - beautiful and ugly. The problems of high-level "ugly" Epic Appearance are a given, but it can be nearly impossible to deal with mortals on an even level with high-level "beautiful" Epic Appearance. As a result, there's a Knack that turns it off for a while - leaving you either generically pretty or generically ugly. The Knack's name is "My Eyes Are Up Here".
There are no specific examples in Exalted, but in a world with amorous jerkass gods, nightmarish demons, nihilistic ghosts, soul-sucking fairies, insane god-kings, eldritch abominations, and even worse entities, being attractive enough to attract the attention of one or more of them definitely counts as a curse. For example, it's explicitly stated that concubines chosen by the Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears...don't survive the night. And as the Manual of Exalted Power: Infernals puts it:
Sometimes, Adorjan falls in love. Her hatred is safer.
Changeling The Lost has the Fairest, humans who were taken by the True Fae to be playthings, lovers, and toys. On the one hand, the lot of them are beautiful and have a buy-in with magic powers that give them unearthly beauty and influence; on the other hand, their Durance likely swung between Kubla Khan and Hellraiser with little warning, and the special attentions the True Fae ladled on them have left them disconnected from humanity and more prone to a fall down the Sanity Meter.
Promethean The Created has this as part of the Disquiet effect for Galateids, who are universally beautiful and, as the name implies, were originally created for purposes of companionship. However, their form of Disquiet initially manifests as a crush that slowly develops into an obsession (or, in the case of folks dealing with sexual orientation issues, severe discomfort) and from there turns into mindless adulation (for those directly affected) and envy and vitriol towards "that slut" (for the loved ones of those directly affected).

Theater

In RENT, Maureen uses her beauty as an excuse for 'flirting with a woman in rubber.' So Yeah.
A male example: in The Food Chain by Nikki Silver, the superficial supermodel Serge says this, then immediately follows it up by listing off his cursed attributes and titillating the two characters listening to his speech.
Stupefyin' Jones (see entry under Film) originated here.
Vicki Bliss, the character from the books by Elizabeth Peters, complains at least once a book about how no one takes her seriously as an intellectual because she looks like a supermodel.
Princess Eboli in Verdi's Opera Don Carlo sings an entire aria, "O don fatale" ('O fatal gift'), quite actually cursing her beauty ("Ti maledico, o mia beltà").
Another male example: in Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience, Grosvenor constantly complains about how he charms every young lady he meets. In fact, he's so beautiful that the woman he loves refuses to marry him because such an act would be too selfish.

Video Games

Male example: Mask of the Betrayer's Gannayev asserts that that the reason he's in jail is that he's "too handsome to look upon." He's not lying either — sort of. According to the warden, Gann has the habbit of bedding nearly anything in a skirt, much to the dismay of every Overprotective Dad on the continent. There's even a set of elaborate runes lining his cell just to make sure he doesn't do it in his sleep (which he can. Gann's probably the only Spirit Shaman who uses his dream hopping powers to get laid.)
Gilgamesh's profile in the Fate Stay Night visual novel gives him Rank A+ charisma. "At this level, it is not so much strength of character, but more like a curse." Given who Gilgamesh is, this is probably a true statement. If Ishtar hadn't come on to him, for example, Enkidu probably would have survived longer. And he did look rather fabulous.
Fall-From-Grace doesn't actually complain in Planescape Torment about all the attention her looks get her—that would be unladylike. But it's got to suck being a blazingly-hot demon that normally gets its jollies through seduction and having willingly taken a vow of chastity...
The entire Heron tribe in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn seems to suffer this, and its few survivors have to cope with the constant threat of poachers. A substantial mission in the first game involves saving Reyson and his sister from a beauty-obsessed noble collector.

Web Comics

Wapsi Square has a short arc featuring the main character, who's improbably busty and thin, and another character working as a model, who is also improbably thin, lamenting how people can't take them seriously. Since it begins with the main character's friend dismissing the model as ditzy, it does serve as a decent Aesop about not judging someone by how they look. However, the main character blames some self-esteem issues on how she is too ideally shaped, inverting the norm in a way that can be frustrating.
Male Example: This trope is a genuine, life-ruining problem for Holden of Arcana. In addition to heightened physical beauty, Holden is also under a magical curse of unknown origin that makes people fall in love with him. But not just some people; practically everyone he encounters. Sounds like a cakewalk, but after having his psycho vampire stalker slaughter his current boyfriend and threaten to kill his brother in order for them to be together, the situation becomes a hell of a lot more heartbreaking.
- There was a reason for that, actually. Turned out Holden was actually the Harpy prince that was being sought after, he just didn't consciously know it until towards the end of the story. Apparently Harpies in this world have that particular glamour about them.
Played horrifically straight in Marilith: In a flashback of Psycho For Hire hitwoman/mob enforcer Valentino's Start Of Darkness, it's shown that she was the daughter of "purged" dissidents in the last days of the USSR. Along with other attractive young girls in the same situation, she is shipped to a secret gulag/training camp operated by party hardliners who want to mold them through Training From Hell into assassin-spies to compromise, blackmail or eliminate key individuals to stop the country's slide towards implosion. The grizzled, bearlike old general in charge of the camp mentions while discussing the plot with a co-conspirator that only God can give such a curse as beauty (the reason those girls were chosen in the first place). Then, as a part of training, the general brutally and repeatedly rapes the girls, starting with Valentino. No wonder she's a sadistic maniac...
Hellsing's Seras Victoria occasionally complains about the effects of her rather stunning figure in And Shine Heaven Now. Her Love Interest counters that he can enjoy her company and respect her as a person and appreciate her chest.
Played with on this Loserz strip with Alice complaining about men looking at her breasts all the time, but refusing to wear more modest clothes because she's so hot it wouldnt make a difference. According to her anyways.
Kharisma from Something Positive considers herself to be a victim of this. The remaining cast disagrees. She gets better... In a 'gets horrid burn damages on face' way.
Didi of ''Menage A 3"" was so attractive it ruined her sex life. Really. (Not safe for work.)
Shortpacked plays the trope even straighter than Twilight - a mummy's wrappings are used to counter the curse (rather than to cover the rotting skin) in an obvious fashion. No one must know!

Web Original

The ostensible villain of the world of Death By Cliche wears a mask to hid his face not because he's ugly, but because he's so beautiful that anyone who sees it full-on promptly has their eyes melt, shortly before they drop over dead.

Western Animation

Duchess in Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends is constantly referring to herself as a "absolutely gorgeous piece of art'' and the like...despite the fact that she is the exact opposite of gorgeous.
- She does resemble a Cubist-era Picasso, for what that's worth.
Minerva Mink of Animaniacs seems to enjoy all the attention after all... except when she tries to get something normal, like shopping for groceries or filing her taxes, but can't because every male around her is panting and howling. Incidentally, this is a lot of fans' reaction, too.
- Of course, the only males who don't have this reaction are those she's actually quite attracted to.
Kim Possible had an episode with a Hot Scientist who couldn't get her work taken seriously because she looked like a model.
That Family Guy episode where Peter had liposuction. He gets into a car crash because he couldn't stop looking at himself in the mirror.
Tee Hee Tummy Tums from The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack. He just wanted people to appreciate him for his combs, not his beauty, so he would put a sack over his head to hide his face. Since the rest of his family has the sacks too, it's possible his wife is the same way, and his children.
In Spongebob Squarepants, getting a door slammed in his face made Squidward So Handsome Its A Curse. He likes it at first but tires of having all of Bikini Bottom following him around everywhere. Mr. Krabs tries to take advantage of this by charging people to see Squidward, all the while he's trying to get Spongebob to slam the door in his face again to get things back to normal. Somehow it turns him even more ridiculously handsome and muscled. Somehow he gets back to normal

Real Life

A little sadder in Real Life. How can you be sure if people like you because you're you or because you're pretty? It may be hard to make friends too, due to "pretty people = The Libby" preconceptions. That being said, if you whine about how pretty you are, ain't no-one going to pity you, girl.
- There is a direct correlation between the sympathy felt for this "curse" and the amount said beauty is currently exploiting said curse. "Oh, why oh why must men constantly stare at my Wonderbra-enhanced popping-out-of-my-top breasts? And why must women be so full of envy at the pretty face I spent only 3 hours perfecting this morning??"
- In the line of lack of sympathy: Brazilian band "Cansei de ser Sexy" got their name after their founders read an interview of Beyoncé where she stated she was "tired of being sexy", and they found the phrase so inane that they translated and adopted it. The fact that the band is composed mostly of very attractive women only adds to the irony.
And even if you're not thought of as The Libby or a true Brainless Beauty, you can still face lesser forms of discrimination. Especially in The Sixties and The Seventies, successful career women who happened to be even mildly attractive were often dismissed as having 'slept their way to the top' because, being women, of course they couldn't possibly have gained their position through actual, you know, merit. A trend that continues to this day, albeit less overtly.
I would say Marilyn Monroe was a real example of this. According to her bio, she was molested as a child several times and she was also typecasted as Dumb Blonde (even though she made a career out of it), and her final years of life were marked by illness, personal problems and a reputation for being unreliable and difficult to work with.
- She eventually married Arthur Miller of all people in an attempt to be taken seriously as an intelligent, substantive person.
- Jayne Mansfield —who was an amateur musician and, by most accounts, quite an intelligent woman— was treated similarly by the film industry.
In ancient Sparta, a citizen could murder a Helot - the working class who outnumbered their militaristic overlords many times over - for any reason. Killing a Helot was in fact an acceptable shortcut through the final exam in their military training. Many Helots were cut down for being too attractive.
Perhaps this is a subtrope, but women who are well endowed often get treated as if they were sexually promiscuous, even if they aren't. This is made worse by the fact that if they have truly huge breasts (we're talking Gag Boobs territory), loose clothing makes them look fat, and tight clothing makes them look slutty. No wonder Soleil Moon Frye (Punky Brewster) had hers reduced.
- Don't forget the difficulty of finding bras that actually fit. Or the purely physical problems of weight and bulk; a lot of large-breasted women have back problems.
  - And imagine having Most Common Super Power at 14, an age when any girl is insecure, but those girls suffer from being leered at all the time by perverts. Breasts don't mean she's an adult, or wants anything.
Apparently an attractive young woman in Germany boarded a city bus and was threatened with being thrown off for distracting the driver. I'd put up the Reuters link but it seems to have expired due to age.
It was believed that some body mutilation traditions for females in tribes were specifically created to make them unattractive and thus have less chance of them being raped and/or abducted in case of war.
- Er, it was only "believed that" in Victorian Britain, Science (or just asking them) has Marched On all over that myth. The "mutilations" were generally to make them more attractive to cultures that had non-Western standards of beauty.
There are several different phobias that can cause this to happen in some people's minds, such as agraphobia (fear of sexual abuse) and erotophobia (fear of sexual love). There may also be the fear of being seen as a sex object (Rulethirty phobia?).
Jessica Biel and Megan Fox both claim to be this. To clarify, that's not disagreeing with the "So beautiful" part. They both are gorgeous. I'm diasgreeing with the "its a curse" part.
- One could expand this to anyone in the entertainment industry who complains about their attractiveness, while gleefully enjoying all the fame and fortune it provides them.
From the Cracked.com article 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't):
"...attractive people have the same self-esteem problems the ugly people do. Like money, attractiveness is relative and if you're hotter than your friends, at that stage you start comparing yourself to people in the media. You know, like the magazine covers we mentioned before, the ones that that have had the living shit Photoshopped out of them.
It gets worse: You know how when the hot girl at the bar tells an unfunny joke, all the guys laugh anyway? Or when the office stud makes a mistake, the female boss laughs it off? Attractive people live in a world where most feedback they get is bullshit. The compliments mean nothing—they've learned that's just the sound people make when they walk by. That's why studies show they tend to dismiss the genuine compliments they get in other areas (their work, personality, sense of humor, creativity) because it gets lumped in with the same counterfeit flattery they've been getting their whole lives."
In the Miss Universe 2009 pageant, Miss Venezuela was asked by former Miss Universe contestant Miss Japan "Do people take you less seriously because you are so beautiful?" Miss Venezuela replied "I work hard for my beauty, it involves a lot of planning and reflects my inner beauty as well as my outer beauty." Sure enough, Miss Venezuela won Miss Universe 2009.