Beauty to Beast

Vanity, like fashion, is a harsh mistress. Beauty fades with time after all, but then there are times that it's taken away before time even has a chance to. Whether because of an accident, curse or illness this character loses their extreme good looks and becomes ugly as sin.

Which is rather appropriate, considering that since Beauty Equals Goodness most characters who suffer this will do a Face–Heel Turn, or if already a villain constitutes a Freudian Excuse for even worse villainy to "get back at the world" that did this to them/mocks them. Of course if this happens to a Jerk Jock or an Alpha Bitch — or simply a physically attractive Butt-Monkey — it may all be played for comedy and be undone by episode's end.

This is named for the fable of "Beauty and the Beast", and since then this trope is closely associated with the Aesop of the vain losing their beauty for boasting of it, and only getting it back if they become humble.

Often leads to a "My face! My beautiful face!" moment, should the villain be a large enough ham. Expect them to go and break every mirror they come across.

Compare the more extensive and Laser-Guided Karma related Karmic Transformation, or even more generally, Forced Transformation. See also Broken Angel, What Have I Become? and Emergency Transformation. Contrast Gorgeous Gorgon. Very likely to happen to the Vain Sorceress, since it's her worst fear. If this is self-inflicted, then it's Tarnishing Their Own Beauty. If it happens to a villain, there's overlap with Evil Makes You Ugly.

Also related to I Just Want to Be Beautiful as the most likely reaction to losing beauty. See also Power-Upgrading Deformation for a silver lining to this fall from grace. Almost always involves Bemoaning the New Body.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Assassination Classroom: As revealed in his backstory, Koro-Sensei was quite the Bishōnen. Dangerous antimatter experiments ended up turning him into the cartoonish octopus creature he is today.
• In Berserk, Griffith's good looks are absolutely ruined by torture, and this, along with the other horrors he suffered during that hellish year would lead to him betraying the Hawks he once led in a truly malignant Face–Heel Turn to become the fifth member of the God Hand.
• Claymore
  • The Claymore warriors definitely seem pretty, but let's not forget the whole Awakening thing.
  • Nor the fact that the incisions necessary to infuse Youma flesh into human bodies to make Claymores leave scars bad enough (not shown for quite a while in the manga, never in the anime) that, in her back story, Teresa used them to eliminate any ideas a gang of bandits had about raping her. They don't look bad for the first few seconds, until you realize that there is a deep and permanent incision where guts and blood can spill out, that starts at her chest and connects to her vagina.
• In Devilman: The Birth when the demon spirits start entering people's bodies after Ryo spills their blood, among them we see two attractive women turn into ugly demons.
• Glass Mask. The reclusive actress Tsukikage Chigusa was forced into early retirement when a lamp lighter fell during a stage accident and burned half of her face off. When she's shown in the series as an old woman after her accident, her face is always half-covered by her hair, thus ensuring that the audience never actually sees her scars every episode.
• In an episode of the rather obscure anime Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid, the sea witch Hedwig got ahold of a bottle of the potion that Prince Justin regularly used to allow him to breathe underwater, adding a drop of another potion that also changed him into a monster after he drank it. Appropriately, the episode was entitled "Beauty and the Beast". His true love, Marina (the "little mermaid" of the title) later kissed him to change him back.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face.
  • Arkham Asylum: Living Hell: Warren White used to be a vain and corrupt playboy billionaire and is fairly easy on the eyes. After being locked up in Mr. Freeze's chamber, he loses his hair, nose and lips to frostbite, cementing his transformation into the Great White Shark.
• Fantastic Four has both Ben Grimm and Doctor Doom.
  • Some versions play this trope straight with Doom, others have him as only suffering a small scar (which he considers horrible because he's such a narcissist). Yet other versions expand on the small scar by having Doom make it worse in an attempt to cover the scar. Still other versions suggest that the physical aspects of the small scar didn't bother him in the least, and that he was instead tormented by the fact that the scar was received at the hands of Satan analogue Mephisto, who filled Doom's head with the sound of his tortured mother's screams at night via said scar, and making him actually horribly burn his face on purpose later (see below), just so he didn't have to hear it anymore. A completely ruined face was a fair exchange for peace of mind. When Doom's mask was created for him, he pressed it to his face while it was still scorching hot from the forge fire. Needless to say, if Doom's face hadn't been badly scarred before, it certainly was after that.
  • Sharon Ventura, the second Ms Marvel, got hit by this twice: the first time by accident, the second as Doctor Doom's revenge for her betrayal.
• Iron Man: Tony Stark, after being badly injured by his own land mine in Vietghanistan. His chest was torn open by the shrapnel badly enough that some of it lodged in his heart — obviously, damage that severe scarred his chest badly. He gained another scar (though a far less noticeable one) after his open-heart surgery later in the comics. Whether or not Marvel's artists would actually acknowledge the scars that would come from such physical trauma seemed to change depending on who was drawing the run at the time.
• In the Elseworlds story Justice, Wonder Woman is scratched by claws laced with a poison which scars her face. In short time, the scar begins to grow and disfigure her as it returns her back to the mound of clay she was made from. By the end of the story, she has little to no hair left on her head, and her entire skin looks like charcoal and burning embers.
• One of the Punisher's Rogues Gallery is a prime example. Billy Russo was originally nicknamed "The Beaut", but after the Punisher introduced him face-first to a glass pane, he now goes by the name Jigsaw. Granted Russo was already a murderous mobster when the Punisher met him, but as Jigsaw he's gone completely Ax-Crazy.
• Superman: In the story "The Lady and the Lion", Superman rebuffs Circe, who doses him with a serum that turns him into a humanoid lion. Supes spends the entire story angsting about it, despite the efforts of his friends at the Planet to cheer him up.
• Wonder Woman Vol 2: The White Magician and turns himself and his horrified ally Cassie Arnold into hideous monsters in his quest to destroy Wonder Woman. He does not succeed, though he does kill her friend Artemis and manages to disgust Circe enough that the witch actually helps Diana take him down.
• Watchmen: Although already pretty much a Psycho for Hire, when the Comedian's face is slashed open in a bar during the war in Vietnam by a pregnant Vietnamese woman, he reacts by pulling out a gun and shooting her in her very visibly-swollen belly. And the child she was carrying? Was his. The gash on his face, made with a broken glass bottle, scarred horribly.

Comic Strip

• Dick Tracy: Tulza Tuzon used to be movie star handsome. In 1943, he was working as a commercial truck driver. On one trip, he was transporting dangerous chemicals when the truck crashed. Tuzon was knocked unconscious and left with half of his face submerged in the chemicals. By the time he was treated, the left side of his face was severely damaged, and his hair had been blanched. He first became a circus freak, and then a criminal under the name Haf-and-Haf.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): One of Alan Jonah's mercs acknowledges that Vivienne Graham was quite attractive when she was human. After she's reborn with San fused to her, their first hybridized form basically looks like a giant-sized version of the wendigo from Until Dawn with sunken eyes, a malformed second head on Vivienne's back and bony protrusions.
• This is used in the first Comatose volume, which is a Beauty and the Beast Fan Vid set to Skillet's "Comatose". However, it's an inversion on the original film's usage of this trope. Adam and Belle are Happily Married newlyweds when Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty curses Adam into a beastly form. The drama now comes from the couple having to learn to live with this huge change.
• King Explosion Murder The Shield Hero: In chapter 18, Princess Malty/Myne fights against her former teammate Rino which eventually leads to a close struggle in which Myne attempts to permanently scar Rino for leaving a big cut across her face, but when the princess attempts to blast fire into Rino's face, the latter dodges just in time and the attack backfires on Myne, burning off half of her face in the process. Afterwards, Myne attempts to hide her disfiguration by covering it with her long hair. But then the next chapter, her punishment for her crimes against the Crown and the Shield Hero consisted of, among other things, getting her hair permanently shaved off, leaving her bald and with a burn scar.
• In Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover, two ex-Cerberus characters discuss this trope with an Alliance soldier who happens upon them. One even has her pre-enlistment headshot—a marked difference from her current Cyborg form. Her friend even comments on how "cliche" the transformation is. Before, idealistic (presumably attractive) young woman who wanted to defend humanity when no one else would. After, a hideous abomination with sunken Electronic Eyes, Death Seeker tendencies, and bloody cybernetics sticking out of places since (working for) Evil Makes You Ugly without OSHA compliance.

Film — Animation

• An interesting variation appears all the way back in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in that the Evil Queen initially does this to herself willingly with a potion. It was supposed to be as a temporary disguise, but she ends up dying in that form when the Dwarfs chase her off a cliff for poisoning Snow White before she can transform back, playing up the irony as the entire reason the Queen wanted Snow White dead was to regain her status as "Fairest in the Land".

Film — Live Action

• In Blood Red Sky, it's shown in flashbacks that Nadja was a fairly attractive woman when she was human. Then she got bitten by a vampire, and in the universe of this film, vampires Look Like Orlok. By the start of the film, her infection has already caused her hair to fall out, forcing her to wear a wig. Her transformation speeds up considerably after she gets shot and then loses access to the medicine that stalls her infection, and by the end, the other passengers aboard the plane are reacting to her with horror as she turns increasingly inhuman.
• In Deadpool (2016), Wade Wilson was played by an appealingly muscular Ryan Reynolds. After he contracted terminal cancer, volunteered for an experimental program as a last-ditch attempt to cure it, and was subjected to horrifying mad science torture in an attempt to give him superpowers, Wade lost his boyish good looks and most of his sanity, becoming a bald, Covered with Scars Cloud Cuckoolander.
• This is the fate of the Alpha Bitches Bridget and Heather in The Final, after the villains torture them by smearing flesh-eating chemicals on their faces. It's revealed at the end that Bridget was the disfigured girl seen in the restaurant in the opening, hiding her appearance behind her hair and a hoodie.
• Laura in Friend Request is the most gorgeous and popular girl in her school, but the spirit of a tormented classmate gradually deprives her of her looks, leaving her disfigured and ugly.
• In The Grudge 2 series, the popular school beauties of the International High School, Vanessa and Miyuki, are transformed into horrifying ghosts by the Grudge curse. Vanessa also loses her beauty while she is still alive.
• In The Hunger (and the novel it was based on), a human who is turned by vampire Miriam will maintain their good looks for several centuries, so long as he/she feeds once a week. What happens when those centuries are up? Rapid Aging, as her current lover John learns. John is played by David Bowie, and the scenes that document his aging, aging, aging into decrepit hideousness are regarded as a triumph of special effects makeup work even today.
• Erik (Claude Rains) in Phantom of the Opera (1943) had him starting out looking normal and then disfigured afterward, in that case by a vitriol-throwing — probably that plot-device came by way of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1935 — remade in The '50s as House of Wax (1953) (which is probably another example)). Other adaptations of the novel that disfigure their Erik-equivalents include the 1962 film, Phantom of the Paradise, a 1983 TV movie, and the 1989 film, but in the book and other adaptations he's deformed from birth.
• In Oz the Great and Powerful:
  • The beautiful Theodora is manipulated by Evanora into eating a cursed apple, crushing her love and compassion and turning her into the future Wicked Witch of the West.
  • The equally beautiful Evanora becomes a hideous hag after Glinda destroys her magical necklace.
• Revenge of the Sith: The handsome Darth Vader ends up getting hideously burnt to a crisp on the lava-planet Mustafar, which results in him having to wear his trademark black armored life-support suit for the rest of his life.
• In Saw X, Cecilia is a tall, beautiful older blonde woman who survives the Death Trap she's thrown into, but is left with a nasty chemical burn on her right cheek, with it being implied (going by the damage it did to Parker's skin) that the Deadly Gas she was attacked with did the same to the rest of her body.^note Given that it burns people's flesh, it's implied to be some kind of mustard gas or other blister agent.
• "Baby" Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She freaks out when she happens to glance in the mirror when she's reliving her child star career and sees her ravaged, sagging, horribly made-up face staring back at her.
• When Evil Calls:
  • Victoria is a beautiful and popular student. Jealous of her gorgeous looks, the homely Jane wishes she was prettier than Victoria. Jane's wish is granted and Victoria is horribly disfigured in a lab accident that destroys her beauty and leaves her face a horrifying mess.
  • The stunning and well-endowed Carol wishes she was older after her teacher, Mr. Dale, rebuffs her attempt at seduction. She soon ages so rapidly that most of her skin rots away and her face becomes a living skeleton.

Literature

• In the modern "Beauty and the Beast" adaptation Beastly, the Jerk Jock is cursed by a witch to become a beast because he's so shallow and self-centered that all anyone likes him for are his looks. The film adaptation tried to do this, but most critics felt that he merely became Hollywood Homely instead. He still gets to keep his six-pack abs, and he looks more like a hardcore punk kid than anything else. Some viewers (including Gabe and Tycho) even felt that he was more attractive and badass-looking in his "beast" form than he was in "pretty-boy" mode.
• Tanith Lee's short story "The Beast" is a "Beauty and the Beast" retelling that inverts a lot of the fairytale's traditional tropes: instead of Vessavion starting the story as an ugly Beast who becomes handsome at the end when the Beauty returns to him and recognizes his inner beauty, he starts the story as a handsome and seemingly perfect man who becomes an ugly Beast (and dead) at the end when his wife Isobel leaves him after learning about his secret hobby of murdering ugly people and taking their incongruously beautiful body parts for his collection.
• The Belgariad has Silk's mother, a former beauty who was badly scarred by a plague. It's described as so tragic — for Silk and his father — that Silk spent 20 years out of the country and breaks down crying after seeing her, and his aunt describes it as a mercy that the plague also left her blind so she couldn't see what had become of her face. Something of a Broken Aesop, given that Silk is a genius who occasionally lampshades that he's stuck with the Face of a Thug.
• In The Case of Lady Sannox by Arthur Conan Doyle, the titular Lady Sannox is the most beautiful woman in London and having an affair with Douglas Stone, a greedy and unscrupulous surgeon. Stone is tricked into cutting off her lip by her vengeful husband, and her beauty is destroyed. Lady Sannox spends the rest of her life as a hideous recluse.
• In Dangerous Liaisons, Marquise de Merteuil ends the book being cast out from high society and afterwards losing her considerable beauty to smallpox. Several of the film adaptations of the book leave this trope out.
• In Duckling Ugly, Cara uses her powers gained from her stay in De Leon to change the beautiful-but-brainless Alpha Bitch Marisol into a grotesque monstrosity.
• In one of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, a beautiful witch curses her victim by giving him the hideous face of a demon. At the end of the story, he regains his rightful appearance, and she... well, guess.
  "M...O...N...S...T...E...R!"
• In The First Law, Glokta is this with a side of Being Tortured Makes You Evil (for a given value of evil; as this series goes, he's one of the least bad guys). He was originally a good-looking up-and-coming officer until he was captured by the Gurkish. Among other things, he was subjected to Eye Scream and The Tooth Hurts, which had obvious effects on his face.
• In Stuart McBride's Halfhead, beautiful Serial Killer Fiona Westfield was subjected to the titular state-designated punishment, going from a deceptively young and innocent-looking blonde to a shaven-headed, lobotomized wreck with no breasts, no orifices, no lips, no cheeks, no tongue, and no lower jaw. When she recovers her mind six years after the lobotomy, she immediately begins using Applied Phlebotinum to get her looks- and her ability to manipulate children into killing- back.
• Harry Potter :
  • The stylishly handsome Bill Weasley has his face clawed by a werewolf, leaving permanent extensive scars. Once his family learns that his personality will be intact, they secretly hope that his ruined looks will drive off his fiancée Fleur, whom everyone but Bill can't stand. Upon hearing a suggestion of doing this from Molly Weasley, Fleur denies that the thought even crossed her mind, declaring that she is more than pretty enough for the both of them. After this, the Weasley family starts to warm up to her.
  • Voldemort was originally very good-looking, but his dark magic and his curse backfiring on him when he tried to kill Harry Potter corrupted him into a snakelike creature. This doesn't seem to bother him since he just wants to live forever anyway.
• In The Hunger Games, Glimmer is the stunningly beautiful tribute from District 1. Her beauty is destroyed and her face is horribly disfigured by trackerjack stings.
• In "My Life In Black And White", by Natasha Friend, Lexi has always been defined by her stunning beauty. She takes great pride in her looks and relishes the attention and popularity her beauty has afforded her. While she is still a nice and charming person, she has become very vain and self-obsessesed, is a bit of a jerk. However, her face becomes completely ruined as the result of a car accident. Lexi becomes permanently disfigured and her old beauty will never come back. She must come to terms with the loss of her beauty and who she is without her good looks.
• In The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh, Princess Margaret is turned into a dragon (the eponymous "laidly worm") by her Wicked Stepmother. Her brother Wynd manages to undo the curse, and returns the favor by turning the wicked queen's magic against her with a branch of rowan-wood, causing her to turn into a toad.
• The Princess Bride:
  • The first part of "Chapter One: the Bride" is about the most beautiful women in the world, and how they all lost their looks. (One lost her figure to chocolate; one survived smallpox, even if her skin did not; and one worried so much about whether she was "perfect" that she prematurely aged herself.)
  • "To the pain" is an example as well; it disfigures someone's body and face, leaving them with their ears perfectly intact ears to hear how repulsed everyone is with them. Westley threatens to do this to Humperdinck, though it never happens.

Live-Action TV

• This is the fate of Stormfront at the end of season two of The Boys (2019). As the season's Big Bad, she had been a sexy, punkish Dark Action Girl in a Spy Catsuit played by the beautiful Aya Cash, but she does not go down beautifully, and when she's defeated, she's missing her right hand, her left eye, and both of her legs while her face has been burned almost beyond recognition. When we see her again at the start of season three, most of her hair is gone, her scalp and half of her face are covered in burn scars, and she's confined to a hospital bed looking like a terminal cancer patient. Between that and how her plans to build a Fourth Reich were destroyed, it's no wonder she kills herself.
• Cassandra of Doctor Who is a camp comical character, but she is also a bit of a tragic example of this. In her extravagant efforts to preserve her beauty and also to remain a "pure human" (while other humans had long since mingled with aliens, producing hybrids), she has turned herself into quite a freak. By the time she's introduced, she's literally a stretched out sheet of skin with a face on it, requiring frequent moisturization to survive. The Doctor, to punish her, lets her dry out at the end of her first appearance.
• Pixelface: In "The Ugly Truth", a magical beauty cream transforms Alexia into a yeti.

Myth and Folklore

• Older Than Feudalism: Very common in Classical Mythology. If a parent's boasting about their daughter's good looks didn't get them sacrificed to the nearest sea-god, then the girl herself, saying she was lovelier than the goddesses, would find herself transformed into a horrible monster of some sort. Meet Medusa. This also had an uncanny tendency to happen to any woman whom Zeus found to be more sexually attractive than his wife Hera.
• A number of The Search for the Lost Husband fairy tales all involve a prince cursed into some animal form and forced to live like that for a set period of time. Circumstances lead to the protagonist, a young girl or princess, marrying him as a beast. Inevitably, the girl (or sometimes her mother) learns of his actual form and breaks a prohibition that forces him to stay cursed and/or leave her forever, but the girl undertakes a long and difficult journey to fetch him and restore his true form.
• There's an old legend of a beautiful young lady who, instead of helping her family with the daily chores, spent all of her time by a pool of water, brushing her hair and admiring her beautiful reflection. One day, a single hair from her head disturbs the serene surface of the pool, releasing a water nymph. The nymph, angry at the woman for her vain and shallow ways (and possibly jealous of the woman's beauty), cursed her, changing her into an enormous, man-eating dragon, cursed to devour anyone who came near, until a knight appeared who was brave enough to remain unafraid of her, and pure enough to find her beautiful. The story ends on a downer note, as it's never said whether or not such a knight ever finds her.
• In Arthurian Legend, Gawain is compelled to marry an incredibly ugly woman, Regnelle, as her reward for saving Arthur's life. On their wedding night, she surprises him by turning into a beautiful woman and explaining that she's under a curse to turn ugly during the day. Now that she's married, however, Gawain can choose to switch it so that she's beautiful during the day and ugly at night if he wants. He asks what she'd prefer, thus passing the Secret Test of Character to break the curse and make her beautiful all the time.

Theatre

• In Damn Yankees, Lola was once the ugliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island, before Applegate turned her into a vamp. He punishes her for rebelling against him by changing her back temporarily.
• Into the Woods: In the Witch's backstory, her mother cursed her with extreme ugliness for losing magic beans from the Baker's father, who was stealing them to satisfy his pregnant wife's cravings.

Toys

• In BIONICLE, the narcissistic Toa Matau considers himself to be this trope after his transformation into a Toa Hordika.

Video Games

• If you run out of lives and get a Game Over in Banjo-Kazooie, then the Wicked Witch Gruntilda succeeds in her plot to steal Tooty's beauty. Just to rub it in the player's face that they failed, they getcutscene in which Gruntilda is transformed into a Hot Witch (visually based on Posh Spice) and Tooty into a hideous gonk.
• City of Heroes:
  • One of the Vahzilok arcs deals with an Eidolon, which in this game are the most humanoid of the reanimated corpses Dr. Vahzilok creates, who tries to regain her former human beauty.
  • In one of the Devoured Earth arcs, a woman named Tanya Tyler is transformed into a hideous monstrousity named "Terra".
• Quelaag and her Sister in Dark Souls went from being beautiful women to being beautiful women with horrible demonic lava-spider lower bodies.
• In Dragon's Lair II, Time Warp the evil wizard Mordroc puts a magic ring on the beautiful Princess Daphne's finger which turns her into a giant ugly horned, pig-snouted, purple-skinned, wart-covered monster, she is changed back when Dirk removes the ring and places it on Mordroc which kills him.
• In The Game of the Ages, you rescue a group that's under a curse that mutates their looks and leaves them mentally retarded. Just asking about them earns you some indignation from townsfolk, who turn out to be relatives.
• Medusa cites this as her motivation for trying to attack Skyworld in Kid Icarus: Uprising, but Palutena quickly counters this excuse, saying she just changed Medusa's appearance to match her dark heart for her actions.
• JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island, anyone? Look at Tiffany, the princess girl. She now looks like a warthog!
• League of Legends
  • Cassiopeia was once a beautiful noble's daughter who seduced other men in order to gather secrets for her father. This proves her undoing when one of these lovers makes her take a vow of secrecy upon a serpentine blade...turning her into a monstrous lamia after she betrays his secrets.
  • Soraka's original lore had her acquire her present half-unicorn form as a cosmic punishment for using her celestial magic for revenge against the chemist Warwick. Her Celestial Soraka skin depicts her glamorous form before she was cursed. This later got retconned to her always being half horse when her lore was completely rewritten.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has Imalia, a Nosferatu vampire who used to be a supermodel. It's said that the Nosferatu clan like to do this to vain, beautiful people in order to Break the Haughty. The tabletop game calls them "Cleopatras" (after the villain from the movie Freaks, due to her Fate Worse than Death).
• Primal: Player character Jen is a pretty Perky Goth woman. Over the course of the story, she gets four Voluntary Shapeshifting forms drawn from the sapient races of Nexus, all of which are very monstrous-looking.
• In the Resident Evil games, a grotesque One-Winged Angel transformation (often followed by a Boss Battle) is a common fate whenever attractive people of any gender get infected with one of the various viruses and other biological agents in the series and don't become simple zombies.
  • Resident Evil 0: In life, James Marcus was a Pretty Boy as a young man and still quite handsome as an older man, before he was murdered by Umbrella. The Queen Leech that assumes his memories and form presents itself as an exaggerated Bishōnen version of his younger self, until it drops the human disguise and mutates into its true, monstrous form in order to fight Rebecca and Billy.
  • Resident Evil – Code: Veronica:
    • Steve Burnside, Claire Redfield's Pretty Boy sidekick for much of the first half of the game, gets captured by Alexia Ashford and injected with the t-Veronica Virus, which causes him to mutate into a hulking, green-skinned monster with Spikes of Doom coming out of his left shoulder. He reverts to his human form after he's taken down.
    • Alexia Ashford herself is a beautiful and brilliant noblewoman who, seeking to ascend to godhood, infects herself with the t-Veronica Virus and has herself cryogenically frozen for fifteen years so that it can more properly bind with her. When she is thawed out, she retains her human intellect but not her human form. While she remains fairly attractive in her first phase even with the chitinous growths over much of her body, her second form sees her turn into a monstrous, dragonfly-like beast.
  • Resident Evil: Dead Aim: Morpheus D. Duvall was a former Umbrella executive obsessed with eugenics and beauty who it is stated had undergone plastic surgery in order to retain their youthful appearance. While biologically male, their transformation into a Tyrant initially sees them take on an attractive female form, though as the fight goes on, damage leads to the same uncontrolled mutations as other damaged Tyrants, causing them to turn into an enormous mass of flesh. To quote the Sphere Hunter in her video on the game:
    Fitting for a villain obsessed with beauty to end up becoming a walking piece of shit.
  • Resident Evil 5:
    • Excella Gionne is the glamorous head of Tricell's bioweapons division who spends most of the game in a white dress that shows off her considerable cleavage. Once Albert Wesker decides that she's outlived her usefulness, he infects her with Uroboros, turning her into a mass of tentacles that later consumes the biomass of the small mountain of dead bodies Wesker conveniently left nearby to grow into Uroboros Aheri, one of the largest monsters in the game.
    • Albert Wesker himself is a slick, muscular, blond-haired hunk of a man who has served as one of the series' primary villains since the very first game. He finally gets his day in this game, where, in a last-ditch attempt to stop Chris and Sheva, he infects himself with Uroboros to enhance his power, turning his arms and much of his torso into a writhing mass of black tentacles and leaving Tainted Veins running through the rest of his body. As if to drive it home, this mutation is preceded by a Shirtless Scene of him staring down Chris and Sheva, the camera focusing on his ripped physique.
  • Resident Evil: Revelations: Rachel Foley is a blonde bombshell in a Spy Catsuit with a neckline down to her navel... until she gets infected with the t-Abyss Virus, transforming her into a Humanoid Abomination whose right arm has turned into a massive claw and whose head opens up into a jaw with a lamprey-like mouth. The kicker: her infection has left a lot of her body intact, including her cleavage, turning what had once been straightforward Fanservice into Fan Disservice thanks to the parts that it didn't leave intact.
  • Resident Evil 6:
    • Deborah Harper was a beautiful college student who was kidnapped alongside her older sister, co-protagonist Helena Harper, in order to force Helena to assist in the villains' Evil Plan. Helena complied, but Deborah was ordered to be killed anyway. Instead of just shooting her, though, one of the villains was implied to be a pervert who specifically wanted to see a beautiful woman get mutated into a monster, and so he had her infected with the C-Virus, which gave her slimy gray skin and caused her to grow massive Spider Limbs out of her back. What's more, she behaves in a very sexual manner throughout the ensuing boss fight, in a manner intended as Fan Disservice.
    • Double subverted with the real villain Carla Radames, whose first mutation turned her into a doppelganger of the Femme Fatale Ada Wong. After she gets shot and left for dead, however, she injects herself with a large dose of the C-Virus and mutates again, this time into a milky white Blob Monster.
  • Resident Evil: Revelations 2: Alex Wesker was a Silver Fox of an older blonde woman before her mutation, which turned her into a hideously deformed crone resembling a Wicked Witch.
  • Resident Evil Village:
    • Lady Alcina Dimitrescu, a Statuesque Stunner of a noblewoman whose sex appeal became memetic from the moment the game was announced, turns into a Draconic Abomination during her boss fight.
    • The main villain, Mother Miranda, is an ageless shapeshifter who uses her powers to normally take the form of a beautiful woman, much as she was before she was infected with the Mold. During the final boss fight, she drops that in favor of a more combative form: her arms turn into massive claws, her legs fuse into a mass of Mold, and appendages grow out of her back that can take the form of either Spider Limbs or crow-like wings. She also takes the form of an old crone at various points in the game.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: Vlad inverts this. While ostensibly able to shapeshift, doing so proved nearly lethal the one time he did, permanently locking him into a hideous bat/bird hybrid form. When he's forcibly shapeshifted into a woman, it results in a Heel–Face Turn (though, granted, the fact that his evil supervillain brother bit the dust at about the same had a lot to do with it).

Web Original

• Looming Gaia: Melusine, monsters created by the divine Haggomah, seek out beautiful people and trick them into kissing them. Contact with melusine saliva causes Haggomah's Blight, a disease that turns its afflicted progressively uglier. Haggomah created melusine as a revenge for how she has been bullied for her ugliness.
• The handsome but scrawny Bruno of the Neopets Tale of Woe plot is offered a potion by a mysterious stranger with the promise that it will make his dreams come true. In the hopes of becoming stronger to impress the girl he loves, he drinks it, only to be transformed into a hulking, grotesque monster.

Western Animation

• Aladdin: The Series : In "Eye of the Beholder" Jasmine takes some magic lotion in an attempt to be more beautiful for Aladdin. It instead slowly transforms her into a human-snake hybrid.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Calender Girl was a model who turned thirty and is alleged to have had a nasty facial scarring beneath her mask. However, she's still quite beautiful, but her obsession has rendered her unable to see anything but the flaws. It crosses over with Gorgeous Gorgon, since she's actually not ugly under the mask.
• Ever After High: Happens to prince Daring Charming in the Epic Winter movie. It's played for laughs as he's a vain (not quite heartless) Jerk Jock, and he has to learn a lesson about not being so vain. It's undone by movie's end, but tellingly it had to be undone with a kiss, and it wasn't from his intended fiancé.
• Similarly Family Guy: Peter gets addicted to becoming more beautiful through plastic surgery. Eventually, he crashes his car and after suffering numerous scarring injuries, lands in a lard vat and drinks all the lard. This ends with him looking exactly as he always does.
• Rocko's Modern Life: Ed Bighead was once known as "The Handsomest Man in O-Town" before an accident involving Heffer, a newspaper, and a giant blender.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • In the first episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo Daphne is turned into a werewolf, surprisingly her werewolf form isn't particularly pretty or feminine looking, instead looks like a long-eared, long-snouted, gray-furred Taz the Tasmanian devil, Flim Flam was able to change her back with his Lotsa Luck Joy Juice.
  • In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island Simone and Lena have sold their souls to a cat god to give themselves immortality and to get revenge on the pirates who killed their friends and families. They become werecats and have to keep feeding on the souls of people who then become zombies. During their initial transformation they're still rather attractive and feminine looking, but during the second stage they're much more beastly, feral, and scary looking.
• The Simpsons:
  • Played for comedy on an episode where Krusty the Clown temporarily loses Sideshow Mel as the co-host of his children's TV show and hires actor Luke Perry, who is his half-brother (don't think about it too much), as a replacement. In a big all-star special edition of the show intended to boost ratings, Krusty fires Luke out of a cannon that sends him shooting all the way across town. He crashes into the Kwik-E-Mart and smashes right through several dozen jars of battery acid; we don't see what happens to him immediately afterward, but we hear him screaming, "AAAH! MY FACE! MY VALUABLE FACE!" Interestingly, the next time we see him, the acid scarring has completely healed.
  • Moe gets plastic surgery to look attractive, but then later a wall falls on him and his face goes back to what it was before. Once Moe points out how it doesn't make any sense, the episode ends.
• On two occasions In Super Friends the beautiful Wonder Woman is turned into an ugly beast, the first was in "The Incredible Space Circus" in which she is turned into a fanged and clawed bipedal rhinoceros monster, and in "The Island of the Dinosoids" she is turned into a dinosaur woman.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): In one episode, April O'Neil gets mutated into a fish woman while in another she gets turned into a wasp woman. Both times, the turtles and April are horrified about how hideous she now looks. A third episode saw her mutated into a feline, though her appearance was not commented on that time. Of course by the end of the episode she is transformed back every time.
• Willo the Wisp (1981): The Prince is turned from a handsome prince into a shaggy Cousin It-like form in the first episode. While there are some attempts to change him back, Status Quo Is God from there on in.
• Winx Club:
  • In season three, this happens to Stella twice—once when Countess Cassandra turns her into a green, fishlike monster, and then later, when obtaining the Water Stars necessitates a Sentimental Sacrifice from each of those pursuing it, Stella's is her face, leaving her with Black Bead Eyes. While neither was a punishment for being vain, Stella is the the most image-conscious of the girls, which in the case of the Water Stars is why that was what she had to sacrifice. neither is permanent.
  • Also in season three, when the Ancestral witches get fed up with Valtor's failure, they transform him from an attractive wizard to a hulking, horned monster with shades of Big Red Devil. The Trix are so disgusted with this that they completely abandon him. While the Ancestresses hope that this new form will be more effective in fighting the Winx, this is also a punishment for his failures.

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