Butter Face

Sin got her mother's body... and her father's face.

"It must be that ass, cuz it ain't your face!"

— Nelly, "Tip Drill"

Suppose you see a gorgeous woman walking down the street. Your eyes pan up the long, luscious legs, those beautiful hips swaying oh so nicely, that slim waist, and of course, those bazooms... butter face, somethin' ain't right about 'er face...

In short, everything is great about her but her face! Get it? "But her face"? Butter face?

This is when a woman is otherwise a total package, but Mother Nature didn't complete the package and she has a face with the shapelessness and sliminess of butter. The kind of face that makes you want to put a bag over it. Often Played for Laughs in cartoons and comedy films. In gags, the woman will often be wearing a Mysterious Veil, setting up for The Reveal. This woman often ends up being an Abhorrent Admirer. Somewhat the opposite of the Gorgeous Gorgon. If a character scores with her, alcohol is usually involved.

Although this is mostly intended for female characters, the trope is unisex. Often overlaps with Fan Disservice.

Also known by the acronym BOBFOC ("Body Off Baywatch, Face Off Crimewatch").

Given the usual attempt for a male observer to get closer for a better look (and looking in exactly the order listed above) this may also be known as "Good from far, far from good".

Compare with Cute Creature, Creepy Mouth, where an otherwise cute creature has a disturbing mouth.

The term for a man with a good body but ugly face is a Shrimp Guy, because you want to remove the head before eating.

Needless to say, this is a hugely impolite thing to say to or about another person; for which reason we want No Real Life Examples, Please!

noreallife

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Examples:

Advertising

• This 2010 back-to-school commercial from Foot Locker parodies the butter face idea in a scene with two high school boys checking out female classmates. A hot girl crosses their view and the boy in front exclaims "she is so fine!", but his classmate behind laments she's a "buttershoes": everything is hot but her shoes. Directing their attention to her ugly shoes, both of them recoil in disgust. Then the second boy spots a cute pair of shoes belonging to a cute girl, and they exchange flirty looks.

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan pulls this off on the two depictions of females holding the Founding Titan. In these forms, their large, nude bodies have the female curves to them, but the faces are anything but what one would call pretty. When Frieda Reiss turned into the Founding Titan, her face was absolutely demonic with teeth bared and crazy eyes. Depictions of Ymir Fritz in her Founding Titan form showed that her head was lacking any skin and was nothing but a skull with hair.
• One episode of Ayakashi Ayashi has a scene with a monster that looks like a regular woman from behind, but has a face that looks like an angler fish. An angler fish that's almost as big her the rest of its body.
• Bleach: Subverted with Tier Harribel, who has a gorgeous body. When she unzips her jacket (which hides the lower half of her face), it reveals a skeletal jaw in keeping with her shark Animal Motif. However, once she enters resurrecion, the bony lower half of her face turns out to be a mask which breaks to reveal that what lies beneath is just as beautiful as the rest of her.
• Douji Kodama's mother Ryoko in Black Joke has an absolutely smoking body, especially for a 53-year old woman. However, she bears an Uncanny Family Resemblance to her son, and thus has a face like a bull's — a flat, wide nose and beady eyes that are much too far apart.
• The Abyssal Eaters from Claymore; 11 women that are either outright naked if not Stripperiffic, with pretty good bodies.....but their eyes are sewn shut and their teeth are just weird.
• Crayon Shin-chan does this as a recurring Running Gag, mostly revolving around the titular character's (often unsuccefssful) attempts to flirt with women far older than him. Notably one chapter where the Noharas are at a skating rink and Shin-Chan, seeing a slim lady with an attractive-looking, shapely body from behind, decide to "accidentally" bump into her from behind so she's help him up. The lady then turns around, only to be revealed as a hideous-looking woman with a shaved double-chin.
• Celty from Durarara!! is a variation: Her problem isn't that her face is ugly, but that she doesn't have one. Or rather, she did, but it's never been attached. Her head does, in fact, have a pretty face, but given that it's in a jar instead of on her body...
• Gintama: Catherine has the body of a busty catgirl and the face of a gyroid. Doesn't help that she has the aggressive bitch personality to match.
• Downplayed with Tomiko in Hajime no Ippo, who has a nice body, but her wide lips and big nose make her a lot less attractive than other female characters. That however isn't an issue for her boyfriend Aoki, since he prefers women with ugly faces anyway.
• Played for Laughs in Hoshin Engi, when Supushan spots Dakki having a bath and tries to pull a sneak attack on her. The gorgeous Dakki suddenly turns around, revealing a monstrous face that makes him faint... only to reveal that it was a mask, and that she meant to do that.
• Machio from How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? has a bodybuilder's physique... but has a perfectly normal young man's face attached to it. Hibiki sees it the other way around: the face is handsome, but the macho body's throwing her off. Akemi, on the other hand, sees him as fanservice incarnate.
• Happens in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders after defeating Midler, the user of the Stand High Priestess. Polnareff goes to take a look at the Stand Master Rose and comments on her gorgeous body, before realizing her teeth have all been broken due to the way Jotaro took out her Stand.
• Kinnikuman is something of a male example, having a truly impressive phsyique and an ugly, ridiculous-looking face. It's played with however, in that the "face" is actually a mask of sorts, though considering that Kinnikuman is almost never seen without it, combined with it being very expressive, it pretty much functions as a second face for him anyway. It's also subverted during the few times we get to see him without his mask, where he's actually shown to be incredibly handsome.
• Gouda of My Love Story!!. Almost 7 feet tall, with superhuman strength and a body built like an Olympic athlete. From the neck up however, he has an unfortunate case of Gag Lips and looks a bit gorilla-ish, leading to him having a bit of dating trouble. Until he meets Yamato anyway.
• Kichikujima: Mari who had her face disfigured thanks to her grandma by accident as a child and thus wears masks. She still has a nice curvy body as a teenager/ young adult. Kanna one of the twin younger sisters of Mari was born with a deformed face unlike her sister Mari.
• One Piece:
  • The 140 years young ass-kicking medic Kureha has a lovely, hourglass shaped body, but the face of a hag. Don't let her know — you WILL get your ass handed to you.
  • There's also Kokoro, the drunken railroad inspector of the Puffing Tom in Water 7. While in the present day she's a straight Gonk, the flashback sequence shows she used to be physically attractive from the neck down before Tom's death caused her to really hit the bottle, though another flashback sequence to presumably her 20s shows she was very beautiful before then. Probably has something to do with the species of fish her mermaid traits take after.
  • A male example in Charlotte Katakuri, whose face is mostly alright and who generally looks like a dark, brooding Hunk. His mouth, however, looks like something that belongs on a demonic dog, and he's not proud of it at all, nor happy with others knowing about it.
  • Catarina Devon has a lovely figure, but an incredibly ugly face, with a sloping brow, crooked teeth and lips, and a stereotypical witch's nose. Yeah◊.
  • Boa Sandersonia, from the neck down, has the body of a gorgeous big-breasted woman whose great height in no way impedes on her loveliness. But her head is an enlarged, flattened oval that evokes the face of a snake and looks disproportionate on her otherwise lovely, slender neck. The perpetual forked snake-like tongue may or may not also apply for this, depending on your tastes.
• Outlaw Star:
  • Inverted in The Strongest Woman In The Universe: Gene decides that Fred Loe's fiance is cute when he sees a picture of her face, but changes his mind when he sees her whole body and discovers that she's a huge, freakishly muscular woman.
  • In the Hot Springs Episode, Gene and Jim are happy to find a woman pulling the Marilyn Maneuver...until they look up and realize she's a Silgrian◊ woman.
• Overlord (2012): Albedo's sister Nigredo has a voluptuous body similar to hers, but her face has no skin, meaning it just have exposed muscle, her eyes, and teeth.
• Invoked but subverted in the Italian Dub of Saint Seiya: upon breaking Shaina's mask in the first episode, Pegasus is very surprised to see how cute she is and remarks that he thought her face was "ugly as a devil's", despite the fact that her body clearly shows she's attractive.
• Space Adventure Cobra had several minor female characters who were mostly beautiful humanoids except for their grotesque alien faces, like a mouse lady during the Mt. Mayfly arc and the scorpion woman from the opening scene of the Hell Crusaders arc. This trope was noticeably used by Buichi Terasawa to get away with drawing topless women with defined nipples under the excuse of Fan Disservice.
• In the high school episode of Space☆Dandy, Dandy goes to prom with a girl who isn't much to look at, with freckles and thick coke bottle glasses that cover up weird orifices she has instead of eyes. But she has such a great ass that it gets its own training montage and musical number.
• Used in a much more serious context in The Yagyu Ninja Scrolls, when Big Bad Wannabe Akinari and his Seven Spears try to slander both the "Hannya Mask" (Jubei) and O-Senhime by having recently-married couples kidnapped. The grooms are tied up and raped by beautiful girls who are forced to wear horrible Hannya Masks to scare them.

Card Games

• Kinkakumon◊ from Digimon Jintrix. Despite being an Ogre Digimon, that would appear to be some sort animal-fashioned tribal mask Kinkakumon is wearing. Of course, like most female/feminine Digimon with masks/helmets, that begs the question of what her face looks like underneath.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics: In one story, Veronica makes herself a Butter Face temporarily by putting a piece of black paper across her front teeth, pretending that they had been knocked out. Then she comes on to Archie, who suddenly remembers he has to go iron his dog.
• Arzach: In one of Mœbius' comics, the titular character watches an attractive woman changing through a window. He goes through great pains to get to her before discovering she is an alien with a face like a dog crossed with a gas mask.
• Camelot 3000: Ninive is a hot woman clad in a semi-transparent gown and a porcelain mask. What's behind that mask isn't very pretty.
• Captain America: Pictured atop this page is Red Skull's daughter, Sin. Just stick her dad's head on a smokin' female body and you'll get the picture. She got better thanks to Kobik. Funny thing is, she did start off as a conventionally attractive young woman, but then suffered severe burns to her face that caused her to lose her looks during Captain America: Reborn.
• Deadpool: Male example. Deadpool, like Spidey and Captain America, has a beefcake bod, but whose face is anything but gorgeous. At least as long as he's wearing his tights and mask, because the rest of his body is just as scarred and hideous as his face. Justified - the tumors are caused by the terminal cancer he's suffering from, which his healing factor makes nonlethal, but doesn't cure.
  • Played straight by his alternate-reality female counterpart, Lady Deadpool. Hot bod, but her face is as ugly as Deadpool's.
• Ghost: In both incarnations, Doctor October is this. The first version is the more extreme, with (apparently) missing teeth and a voice described as sounding as if she gargled with razor blades and toxic waste; the second is badly (but normally) scarred.
• Green Lantern: Karu-Sil from the Sinestro Corps mutilated her own face to better fit in with the pack of predators that raised her.
• Judge Bao and the Jade Phoenix: There's a prostitute named "Two Moons", for reasons that prove themselves quite obvious, and a very impressive figure. She also always goes around wearing a hat with a veil that hides her face. Considering the title of this trope, it should be obvious why.
• Justice Society of America: Way back in the early days of the JSA, Johnny Thunder was thrown back in time and was betrothed to a princess who always wore a veil. Since this example belongs to this trope, you can see where this is going...
• L'Expedition: The French comic has a Roman soldier with the nickname "the Lion of Nubia". A Nubian queen who aided rebels against Rome demanded that the soldier be given to her as part of the peace agreements. Since she was only shown from the back with a Form-Fitting Wardrobe up to then, it makes her seriously deformed face all the more hideous (and stuck the poor bastard with an ironic nickname).
• Lucifer: The Lilim Mazikeen appears as an incredibly beautiful woman, but half of her is horribly misshapen and skeletal. Ironically, she's very proud of how she looks; when her face is made symmetrically beautiful in one arc, she treats it as a horrible, disfiguring attack on herself.
  • Justified in that her previous hideous appearance was a deliberate shapeshifting choice that she could have changed any time she pleased. "Healing" her actually trapped her in one shape.
• MAD: A short comic by Don Martin features a guy posing at what appears to be a traditional photo stand-in. Only when he steps away after his photo is taken do you see that the studly body is actually his—the stand-in is the handsome face hiding his gaunt, bug-eyed one.
• Morbius: Michael Morbius had kind of a weird-looking face even as a human; being turned into a living vampire made it more extreme, while it did wonders for his physique.
• Paperinik New Adventures: Invoked and discussed in one extra. The staff of Channel 00 discuss a famous soap opera actress who always arrives with her head covered by a scarf, large shades and a large brimmed hat, and then spends four hours in the beautician's office. Angus claims she's nicknamed "Iguana" and another one claims she has a nice pair of moustache. Completely subverted when it's revealed that the actress in question has a face as beautiful as her body, she just spends four hours inside because she feel she's expected to do so, while the beautician gets a four-hour long pause, so she doesn't complain. Played seriously in issue 28 by Rhaghor, an Evronian beast-man supersoldier. At first he looks like a bigger, hairier Evronian whose face is covered by a helmet... then he removes the helmet, to show a bare, downright demonic face with yellowish hide and smaller fanged mouths on tendrils, a sight which shocks with horror his superior commander.
• Superman: In a male example, an old comic from the Silver Age had Superman pretend to be this as a prank on Lois to teach her a lesson on appearances after she pulled a similar move on a poor schmoe to discourage him from trying to date her.
• Tales from the Crypt: The story "Only Skin Deep" features a man who meets a sexy woman at Mardi Gras whom he thinks is wearing a hideous witch mask. Turns out it's her real face, which he doesn't figure out until the morning after their quickie marriage, when he tries to remove the mask. This being Tales from the Crypt, it doesn't end well.
• Watchmen: Some fans consider Rorschach to be one. Since he spends his nights beating up criminals twice his size, he at the very least must be quite fit. Emphasized in the film, where Rorschach is very muscular but somewhat lacking in the face department. It might explain why he considers his mask to be his true face.
• Zatanna: Zatanna (2010) #14 has a Yuki Onna trying to seduce Zachary, but when she's caught and reveals her true form, her body retains it's voluptous curves but her head is just a giant Monster Mouth.

Comic Strips

• Beetle Bailey
  • There's a strip in which Beetle and Killer both whistle at a woman who looks attractive from behind, but when she eagerly turns her buck-toothed face to look at them, both point at each other in an "it was him" kind of way.
  • Sarge's imaginary picture of his ideal woman in a raven-haired muscular woman with a face exactly like his own.
• The Li'l Abner comic strips has at least one example of this in the form of Lena the Hyena. The "ugliest woman in the world", Lena hailed from Lower Slobbovia, and while from the neck down she was shown as a fairly attractive woman, her face was always censored in the strips themselves in order to "protect the reader from her madness-inducing visage". In fact, the strip creator Al Capp himself never drew Lena's face, but instead held a contest for people to submit what they thought she might look like. After submissions from the likes of Carl Barks and Jack Cole, the winning picture was by Basil Wolverton: a barely describable caricature◊, with a spindly, forward-jutting neck, back-sloping head, thinning hair dangling in greasy curls, large cauliflower ears, bristly eyebrows, an elongated yet flattened almost trunk-like nose, a dangling lower lip perpetually dripping with drool, a dry tongue with a cracked and lumpy texture, and massive, twisted teeth that jut so far out of the jawline past the lips the effect is reminiscent of a skinned horse's snout pushing out through a human skin mask.
  • Historical figure Sadie Hawkins, who inspired the Sadie Hawkings Day, when spinsters and the unmarried were allowed to violently capture men who took their fancy and forcibly wed them, had a nice enough figure, but was widely regarded as the homeliest woman in Dogpatch at the time, due to her abundant freckles, buck teeth, big, crooked nose, thin neck, prominent Adam's Apple and large ears.

Fan Works

• The Bolt Chronicles: Blaze describes his walleyed girlfriend Tracey as having an ugly face in "The Cameo." He uses the phrase "two-bagger" while doing so, suggesting that Tracy is sexy as long as you cover her head in a doubled paper bag.

Films — Animated

• Cars 2: During the scene where Mater, Finn McMissile and Holly Shiftwell are looking for Tomber, an odd three-wheeled car running the local black market in Paris, France; Mater actually sees a car facing away from him while inside the black market, and as soon as Mater talks to her, the car immediately turns around, revealing that her eyes are actually on her headlights instead of her windshield like everyone else's! Mater than screams and drives away to find his teammates.
• Downplayed in Despicable Me 3 with Valerie Da Vinci. We get a panning shot showing her rather shapely figure...and then we get to her Gag Nose.
• Entergalactic: Ky brings up having a brief relationship with a white woman who turned out to be a Russian hacker. He mentioned she had an amazing body, especially her butt, but an alright face.
• A variant in Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation. Frankenlady is, for the most part, conventionally attractive. It's not her face but rather her huge, hulking right arm that scares off Drac.
• In Teacher's Pet, during the song "A Whole Bunch of World", a hula girl is seen dancing with her arm in front of her face (except her eyes). Then she takes her arm away from her face to reveal her face is crooked and ugly.

Films — Live-Action

• In Are You Being Served?, Cesar Rodriguez has this reaction after seeing a photo of Mrs. Slocombe sticking her head through a hole to make it look as if she had a glamorous body:
  Cesar: The face, oh, ay-ay... but the body, heh? Ay-ay-ay!
• The Witches of Ar in The Beastmaster are bikini-clad centerfoldesque women...with hideously deformed faces.
• Referenced in Booksmart when a group of teens say that Molly is cute but has a "butter-personality" that they'd need to put a bag over. While Molly is within earshot in a bathroom stall.
• Played with in John Waters's Cry-Baby — the aptly named Hatchetface is introduced in the classic "gag" manner in the opening scene, where two hoodlums standing in line behind her waiting to get vaccinations reach for her attractively swaying bottom, only to be shocked when she turns around and reveals her flattened nose, crossed eyes, and horrible teeth. The traditional Abhorrent Admirer aspect of this trope is averted in the rest of the film, though — she has a very happy relationship with one of the male characters, and none of the Drapes treat her any differently than the gorgeous Wanda, played by Traci Lords.
• Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo: The chick from Chernobyl with the, erm, appendage in place of her nose.
• Very briefly in From Dusk Till Dawn when Santanico Pandemonium shows her true face to Seth Gecko, which just Looks Like Orlok while from the neck down she still has Salma Hayek's bod.
• 1940s film star Martha Raye was often this. She had a great body and a terrific singing voice but was often the "butter face" sight gag in films like 1941's Hellzapoppin' due to her disproportionately large mouth.
• Love Hard: When Natalie does sexy karaoke at the local bar, the men react with interest while her back is to them, but this turns to shock and embarrassment when she turns around to reveal a red, puffy face (the result of being allergic to the kiwi in some shots she took prior).
• In Porky's Revenge, Porky's daughter Blossom is like this, with Porky forcing a Shotgun Wedding on Meat because she told her father they went "all the way". (They hadn't, and however far they did get, it was all Blossom.)
• Parodied with the ghoul that attacks Shorty in the second Scary Movie. At first he's horrified and it looks like she's strangling him, but he's actually having sex with her, solving the problem with a paper bag ("No no, no kissing!"). They're still together at the very end.
• Employed with a pretty racist twist in Buster Keaton's 1927 Seven Chances.
• Galaxina sees Captain Cornelius Butt and his crew in a bordello staffed by Rubber-Forehead Aliens. He lets his fingers do the walking up the torso of one such only to part her hair, do a quick double-take, then beckon the madam to him. Butt is handed a paper sack with eye holes cut out, he puts in on the courtesan, and the duo head off to complete their transaction.
  Captain Butt: "Good thing you're not two-faced, otherwise you wouldn't have chosen the one you've got on. Come on."
• Happens in Spaceballs when the Captain of the Guard believes they've recaptured Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) and her compatriots. Turns out he's only half right.
  Captain of the Guard: (yelling at his men) You IDIOTS! These are not them! You've captured their stunt doubles!
  • Makes sense for this trope when you take into account that Princess Vespa's stunt double is a grotesque-looking man with long, straggly hair and a cigar, who just happens to have a fantastic body.
  • Princess Vespa herself was an example before undergoing major rhinoplasty. The Spaceballs blackmail her father the king by threatening to undo it, and he cracks almost instantly. And judging by by her response, she was not any bigger of a fan of going back either!
• Done as a gag with a horse-faced alien prostitute in the So Bad, It's Good 1980s movie Space Raiders.
• Spider-Man 3 has a male example with Venom. Unlike the comics, his height and build are very similar to Spider-Man's, but he retains the symbiote's horrifying face.
• In Splice, Uncanny Valley Girl Dren is described as a "butterlegs".
• In Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Barry constantly refers to Jenny (played by a young Renée Zellweger) as "ugly" or "a dog." But his girlfriend has seen her change in the locker room, and insists she "has a body to die for." She merely hides it to deflect the attentions of her stepfather.
• In The Three Stooges, Curly or Shemp often ended up with one of these while Moe and Larry got attractive women.
  • A few times, Curly and Shemp became this as they dressed up in a drag disguise.
  • Done with a veil reveal in "Mummy Dummies."
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie Valiant sees what he thinks is the silhouette of Jessica Rabbit in the window of an apartment. But it turns out that it's Lena Hyena, who somehow managed to make herself look just like Jessica (toon physics or something), excluding the face. As soon as she saw Eddie, the rest of it unraveled.

Gamebooks

• Trial of Champions has an optional (but compulsory) encounter with the Liche Queen, whose body looks like that of an attractive woman... but with a fleshless face whose skin is literally stretched into her skull. The accompanying illustration doesn't do her any favours.

Literature

• The titular villain of The Beetle is initially described as being so hideous “it was impossible such a creature could be feminine”, and most people assume she is a man. After she transforms back into a human in front of Sydney Atherton he sees that not only is the Beetle a woman, she's "by no means old or ill-shaped either."
• Ygritte from A Storm of Swords is described this way. Being a free folk raider, she has a muscled and shapely body, and she's "fire kissed" (red-haired) but her face is rather lacking, and her teeth are crooked.
  • Sandor Clegane is a male example. His face is a burned mess, but Sansa Stark and some female servants at the Red Keep have noted his strong, well-build body.
• Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
  To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model—to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended—was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
• In Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Joelle Van Dyne is genuinely gorgeous until an accident leaves her face "hideously and improbably deformed." Her body, however, remains pristine.
• In Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, the main character, Orual, is thought to be extremely hideous—until she starts wearing a veil regularly, and everyone realizes that her body is actually extremely shapely.
• Homer Hickham acknowledges this as a cruel nickname in Rocket Boys. The Coalwood High version was "Old Glory," much like Poland's.
• Played with in One Lonely Night. Mike Hammer hits on a plain-faced woman in order to get information from her. Unexpectedly she turns up at his apartment in "a dress that could have been painted on", and turns out to have an amazing body.
• Mentioned in Benjamin Franklin's letter Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress. Franklin gives 8 reasons why the best mistresses are old women. Number 5 is that when a woman begins to show signs of aging the face goes before the rest of the body, and you can just put a basket over her head.
• A straight example in Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up: The main character is at a "mixer" dance and he approaches a girl with a nice butt, shapely legs, and long shiny hair. Then she turns around... The MC comments (in the narrative) that she'd do the world a favour by going around with her back to it.
• Referenced in Aztec. In Nahuatl, there's a spirit in some areas called the Xtabai, who appears first as a flame, and then a beautiful naked woman who dances a ways off, but the unwary traveller can't see her face. When she's lured him to quicksand, she reveals her face to him, and it's a grinning skull. When Mixtli follows the flame, he finds some sort of muck that smells like rotten eggs, and comments that no matter how beautiful, no one would want the Xtabai if she reeks like that. It turns out to be useful, though, as the muck is a sort of tar that is good fuel for his fire.
• In And I Darken Lada is very honest with herself about how ugly she is (so is everyone else) but Huma, a successful concubine, sees a lot of potential within her for 'feminine wiles', though she only advises to draw attention to Lada's body. Though not the stick-thin and delicate style of the time, she's described as pretty shapely.
• In Ellen Godfrey's Georgia Disappeared, Jane's first meeting with Georgia is written as a homage to Marian Halcombe's introduction in The Woman in White — Jane first sees Georgia silhouetted in a restaurant doorway, then walking gracefully towards her. Only when Georgia gets close does Jane realise how pretty she isn't.
• Mildmay in Doctrine of Labyrinths is a male version. He's athletic and well-built, but has a bad case of Face of a Thug due to a large, disfiguring facial scar from a knife fight.
• A non-visual version in Judge Dee when the judge meets a blind old courtesan, whose voice is impossibly beautiful and arousing, but the dissonance between the voice and the body it's coming from feels wrong.
• In Ralph Ellison's short story "A Coupla Scalped Indians", the eleven year old protagonist Riley finds himself in the yard of Aunt Mackie, an old herb doctor whom he thinks is a witch. He ends up looking through the window of her shack and sees a naked woman with a young girlish body whose back is turned to him. He is briefly stunned when she turns around as she drinks from a glass only to get the shock of his life when she lowers the glass when sees "the wrinkled face of Old Aunt Mackie."
• John Wilkes Hopkins from Ray Bradbury's Death Is A Lonely Business is a male example, being an aging actor with an idealized young athlete's body straight out of the ancient art world thanks to a strict lifelong regimen. It doesn't strike others immediately as he meticulously conceals his physique in suits, but when he reveals a photograph of himself stripped down, the protagonist is floored by the contrast and tries to figure out whether he pasted on the head.
  It was like those contest picture puzzles they used to print in newspapers when I was a boy. The faces of presidents, cut in three sections and mixed. [...] But here a young man’s Greek-statue body was fused to the neck, head and face of a hawk-eagle-vulture ascending into villainy, madness or both.
• Stinger: Nancy "Nasty" Slattery's skintight pants and figure are repeatedly emphasized in her admirer Ray Hammond's pov scenes, but he also admits she has a pointy chin and chipped teeth and marks of having once broke her nose (the latter two features from falling face first during a track meet) that cause her to "just [miss] being pretty."

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development: Season 4 introduces DeBrie Bardeaux, who not only has a rather worn face (from the years of drug problems), but at one point is even referred to as a butter face. Granted, it was because her face was covered in butter at the time, but this show rather likes puns.
• Get Smart. 99 is relaxing in a bubble bath when she gets an Avengers Assemble call from the Chief. A Reveal Shot then shows she's posing for a photographer, who objects in vain about her walking out on him. So the photographer asks another woman if she wants to hop in the tub. Cue a camera pan up the long legs...of the photographer's middle-aged mother. She refuses, naturally.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): A complete inversion of this trope occurs in the episode "Eye of the Beholder". The main character's face — bandaged until the reveal at the end — is just as beautiful as her body... but to the standards of all other characters — who have hideous faces — she is the one with the butter face.
• Inverted the in the Night Gallery episode "The Different Ones", also written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. A severely disfigured teenager is sent as Earth's representative on a cultural exchange with a newly contacted alien planet with the theory that he'll be treated better there because they won't know the difference. During the transfer he meets their representative, a conventionally handsome youth who interacts with the protagonist as thought he were the butterface. The planet's inhabitants are later revealed to look just like him, in fact he's considered "gorgeous" by local standards.
• In Reno 911!, Deputy Trudy Wiegel is said to have a decent body but she's still a triple-bagger (a bag for you, a bag for her, and a bag for anyone unfortunate enough to be watching).
• In Curb Your Enthusiasm, this turns out to be the case with a woman who was wearing a full burqa and veil on her date with Larry's blind friend...who dumps her as soon as he finds out she's ugly.
• This was often a gag on The Benny Hill Show, in a manner similar to the Spaceballs example above (the "female" actor would actually be a man in drag, often with a rugged face and a beard).
  • Often a twist on the concept would be skits when Benny would be dancing with four other dancers. The partners of the other three would come out, one at a time, and be spectacularly beautiful, with Benny anticipating his to be equally sexy, only for her to come out and be extremely homely.
  • One of his more memorable sketches was a spoof called Archie's Angels, where he and three other men played very homely expies of Charlie's Angels. It's even lampshaded.
    David Doyle expy: Yes, they're here, Archie... and they're looking as lovely as ever.
    [Slow pan across the three girls' incredibly homely male faces, one of them even smoking a cigar.]
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Meridian", one of Quark's customers requests a holobrothel session with a duplicate of Major Kira. Kira and Odo find out about it, and hack the program so that the client is greeted with an image of Kira's body topped off by Quark's head.
• Patty Maloney as the little woman◊ in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Thaw".
• The title character of the Masters of Horror episode "Jenifer" is this. Possibly to the point of exaggeration, in that her face looks downright monstrous while still having a model's body.
• In an episode of A Different World, Dwayne and Ron are admiring the shapely figure of a young woman who is facing away from them. Dwayne wants to go and talk to her, but Ron cautions him: "This could be a case of dreamboat body, but shipwreck face!" Dwayne comes up with an idea—he sneezes, knowing the woman will likely turn toward the sound. Sure enough, she's hideous, and the guys are horrified.
• Brought up in the first episode of Dexter where Angel and Masuka are discussing why the body of the prostitute they found had no head.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • In a "Wayne's World" segment run in the early days of the first Iraq war, Mike Myers referred to the word "Scud" [an Iraqi missile] as sounding like when "you see a girl from a distance and go 'Hello, babe alert!' then when she gets closer you say 'Omigod, she's a scud!'"
  • In the sketch "The Sinatra Group", this is invoked somewhat by Frank Sinatra (played by Phil Hartman) regarding Sinéad O'Connor (Jan Hooks), rather her face isn't ugly, but the fact that her head is completely shaved is distracting to him. When Luther Campbell (Chris Rock) says he doesn't care about her head and prefers the rest of her body, Sinatra agrees and suggests maybe putting a paper bag over her head.
• In Living Color!: One of Jamie Foxx's recurring characters was "Wanda, the Ugly Girl" who was made of this trope.
• In the Supernatural episode "Frontierland", Dean travels back in time to The Wild West, and is looking forward to getting on with the saloon girls, unfortunately they're a bit too homely for his taste. Another girl flounces down the staircase, only when we see her face, she's not only homely but also has skin blemishes hinting at certain social diseases. Dean is bending backwards over the bar as she tries to smooch him, when fortunately a man who'd already booked her interrupts.
• In the pilot episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy & Ethel make themselves up as homely country gals and then come on to their husbands as a Secret Test.
• Castle is overjoyed when Beckett invites him for a private showing of her Nebula 9 cosplay uniform (which naturally follows Theiss Titillation Theory). After teasing him from behind a door with a showing of leg and butt, she then leaps out and growls wearing a hideous alien mask. Castle flees.
• On the American Shameless, Frank's arc in season two had him romantically involved with Dottie "Butter face" Coronis — or, rather, the insurance money he might collect if and when she passed away.
• Little House on the Prairie. It's Albert and Laura's first day back to school, and they have a new teacher. Albert, convinced she will be young and beautiful, takes special care with his looks because he wants to make a good impression. As they enter, they see Miss Wilder from behind as she is writing on the chalkboard. She does indeed appear to be young and beautiful—until she finishes writing and turns to face the class. The Reveal comes complete with a jarring trombone sound effect. She is a gaunt, middle-aged spinster with a shrill voice. Albert is visibly disappointed, and Laura teases him.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: One-Shot Character Candy spends all of her screen time wearing form-fitting yoga pants and a sports bra but also spends all of her screen time vamped out, displaying her demonic face.
• Parodied in an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race. Season 10 had contestants Asia O'Hara, Aquaria, Monet X Change, and Yuhua Hamasaki promote a dating app called "Madam Buttrface", with Asia putting on the most hideous makeup she could muster◊ to be the face of the app.
  Asia: Everyone knows that during the summertime... A bangin' body is way more important than a cute face.

Music

• Perilously close to the Trope Namer is The Monks (who, amazingly were most of The Strawbs!) Cult Classic, "Nice Legs, Shame about Her Face".
• Used in Aphex Twin's music video for "Windowlicker", which has plenty of bikini-clad women...with the catch being that they all have James' bearded face and creepy grin. Special note goes to the ugly bucktoothed woman.
  • The same Digital Head Swap effect is also used on the song's single cover.
• Nelly's song "Tip Drill"^note FYI, the phrase tip drill is a street colloquialism for a Butter Face. The image comes from basketball; if you barely got the ball on the tip of the basket and it made it in, you technically got it in, but it's nothing to brag about! got a lot of flak for exploring this trope in a provocative manner. (WARNING: The music video is definitely NSFW.)
• DJ Jimi's "Where They At": "It must be your pussy cuz it ain't your face."
• The Alternative Rap group Black Sheep's song "Strobelite Honey" is about the rapper Dres meeting a girl in a club. He can't see her face due to the strobe lights, but he can make out her "slammin" silhouette. Then he gets her in the light. Hilarity Ensues.
• An example used in both the song and the video for "Gangsta Nation": "I don't holler at these hoes that sing like Ashanti, body like Beyoncé, face like Andre!"
• Raimundos had the song "Pequena Raimunda", based off Ramones' "Ramona", named after the local name for a Butter Face - akin to Cockney Rhyming Slang, "Raimunda" rhymes with Ruim de cara, boa de bunda, "bad face, pretty butt". It's filled with phrases describing her such as "if she's leaving you can care, if she's coming better not stare" and "great on all fours, terrible on a 3x4"^note size of a regular document headshot in centimeters, roughly 1.77" X 1.38", and a chorus where the narrator says he's going to the bar to be able to face her.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's video for "Perform This Way" features a half naked woman dancing around in bizarre but revealing outfits... who also has the face of Weird Al himself edited onto her body.
• "Keep it Goin' Louder" by Major Lazer features a bunch of mostly plus-sized scantily clad women dancing, complete with slow-motion twerking and bouncing. It would be titillating if not for the fact that most of them look like... well, this◊.
• Neon Indian's "Fallout" video is about a woman with long, sculpted legs, flowing pink hair, and gigantic breasts which the camera keeps focusing on. The mechanics in the video fall madly in love with her, and give her car a full tuneup. Then, at the very end, she takes off the sunglasses she'd been wearing up to that point, revealing some seriously derpy eyes, and the mechanics gape in shock as she drives off.
• Inverted in Ronnie Barker's song "Not Too Tall And Not Too Short", where one of the girls the singer dated "had a face like a summer's morn... and a shape like a bag of nails."

Mythology

• Medusa always has a hideous face with snakes for hair, and usually fangs, a beard, and bulging eyes as well. But sometimes she's depicted with a beautiful human body. Then again, in ancient Greek artwork she's usually depicted with a scaly, clawed, inhuman body below the neck. And one of the oldest images of her incongruously makes her a centaur with a leering skull for a head.
• Inverted with the Sirens; their faces were pretty, but their bodies were like those of birds (not fish, but birds), from either the waist or neck down ^note  The bird form was common because of their beautiful singing voice.
• A Japanese Youkai appears as a beautiful yet familiar girl if seen from behind, but has actually the face of a bearded brute or an old man. Its name can be translated as "Irony". One could also count many examples of trickster youkai who pretend to be normal humans, only to suddenly reveal a massive mask-like face to scare the shit out of their victims.
• The Kuchisake-Onna. Genuinely beautiful, until she shows you her Glasgow Grin and asks if you think she's pretty with it. If you say no, she kills you for being rude. If you say yes, she kills you for being a liar. You can weird her out by asking if you are beautiful, or confuse her by saying she's average or only a little pretty. She'll leave, either out of ire or not knowing what to do next.
• In Nordic mythology, the goddess Hel is depicted as half beautiful woman, half rotting corpse◊ (as befits the Death and Underworld deity). Depictions vary as to which half is corpse and which beautiful woman. One version has the dividing line run vertically down her body from crown to feet. Thus viewed from one profile she is stunningly beautiful. But when she turns to face you...
• In modern-day Central American urban legends, we have the Sihuanaba, a spirit that looks like a beautiful woman from behind. She appears bathing in a lake or river and lures men to their deaths, but not before revealing that her face is actually that of a horse. Mind you, in this case, there are men who wouldn't be put off by The Reveal at all.

Professional Wrestling

• In the late 90s WCW went through the motions of starting a woman's division, and they hired a female wrestler named Dee Dee Venturi for it. Commentator Bobby Heenan called Venturi a butter face, and was met with (possibly legitimate) irritation from his co-commentator Tony Schiavone.

Tabletop Games

• One of the sample characters in the Nosferatu clanbook from Vampire: The Requiem, Mary Contrary. She loves to wear Stripperiffic clothes that complement her hot body, but her face..."looks like it's been hit with a shovel. Over and over again". Being a Nosferatu, Mary exaggerates the trope. It would be bad enough just with this description, but then we actually get to see her.
• In the Scarred Lands monster book Creature Collection II: Dark Menagerie, the Blood Maiden, is introduced as an otherwise gorgeous shoal-dwelling siren who just so happens to have a lamprey-like maw instead of a face. Obviously, they feed on blood, and not only that, but they are all female as well. Guess how they reproduce?
• This trope applies In-Universe to Trixiebelle the Gremlin in Malifaux, where her ample cleavage, smooth limbs, nice butt and penchant for skimpy clothing are spoiled by the fact she has a fairly typical gremlin face (faintly glowing solid red-orange eyes, blank skin where her nose should be, a somewhat oversized mouth full of sharp pointy teeth), even if other gremlins think she's gorgeous due to the combination of her body and her lack of any inbreeding-induced facial deformities. Consequently, she's got a special ability called "Gremlin Lure" that lets her draw other gremlins towards her, but forces other races to move away — even the Resurrectionists and Neverborn. To some fans, though, she looks more like a Cute Monster Girl.
• Magic: The Gathering has the powerful vampire Shauku (represented in the game with the card Shauku, Endbringer), who has long, flowing dark hair, a nice body with large breasts highlighted by her very revealing, elegant dress... and a horrifically withered face that looks more bestial than human, sporting More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Unlike most examples, she does also have eerily bony arms with razor-sharp claws that give her monstrous nature away even without looking at her face.

Theatre

• Male example: Alvaro Mangiacavallo of The Rose Tattoo has a finely sculpted body, but his face looks as ridiculous as his last name sounds. Serafina keeps repeating to herself that he has a clown's face on her late husband's body.

Video Games

• You can play as one in basically every game that lets you fully create your characters, such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3 onwards or the Saints Row series; your female character can look drop-dead gorgeous from the neck-down, but play around with the face sliders enough and you can end up with a Butter Face that would make even Mileena look like a fashion model.
• The nurses in the Silent Hill series have very nice bodies and what are apparently tumors for heads.
• Atomic Heart has the Twins, who much like the nuns from Silent Hill above lack faces entirely and can easily be in the Uncanny Valley, but more than make it up to it with shapely figures that look like Soviet Playboy Fembot models. Heck, their trailer scene literally has sexual connotations to it, though that last part can be seen as quite disturbing for some.
• The Battle Nuns in Brütal Legend look pretty hot from the neck down. Their, uh, "faces", on the other hand...look like zippers (and little more) that produce weaponized Vomit Indiscretion Shots. When Eddie first sees one, he says she's "the definition of butter face. But kinda sexy, though, in a weird way".
• One of the bosses in Harmful Park is a gigantic anime girl whose face remains outside the screen for most of the battle. If you defeat her on easy mode, she sits down and you realize her face to be hideous compared to the rest of her body - from her acne-ridden face to the gigantic mole and oversized nose (on hard mode, however, she looks like an average anime girl).
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Mileena has become one of the best-known Butter faces in video games (Johnny Cage even calls her such in Mortal Kombat X). At first she looks like your typical Femme Fatale in a purple ninja outfit. That is, until she takes off her mask and turns out to have More Teeth than the Osmond Family. This is due to being part-Tarkatan (like Baraka, below). In spite of all this, Mileena still tends to be considered attractive by fans.
    • Downplayed in Mortal Kombat X: her face looks more humanlike, with a fully functional set of lips. She still has rows of Tarkatan teeth lining her cheeks in a menacing Glasgow Grin, though. Mortal Kombat 1 further downplays this one: In this incarnation, Mileena is not locked into permanent Tarkatan face, but the Tarkat is now a disease she contracted and one of the symptoms is that she will end up having her face disfigured. There is a time when Mileena is just traditionally attractive, and she still makes the best out of her eventual Butter Face with other virtues.
  • Same can be said about Baraka, a Rare Male Example, whose body is muscular in an attractive way but whose face is anything but attractive.
  • Shao Kahn is another male example. The guy has the physique of a bodybuilder and normally wears little else than a loincloth, boots, shoulderpads, and a harness. He also normally wears a full-faced helmet, but when he doesn't... except in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, where he has a normal human face (specifically, that of Brian Thompson) under the helmet. He also has a normal human face in Mortal Kombat: Legacy.
• The Ghost Lady from Uninvited. When seen from behind, she does kind of look harmless and look like Scarlett O'Hara. When you look at her face, though...well, she doesn't really have a face, per se.
• Zevran of Dragon Age: Origins mentions this trope by name in a conversation with Leliana, remarking on a woman that he'd been ogling. Leliana tells him, "You are a very bad man."
• One of the Enemy Chatter from [PROTOTYPE 2] has a soldier comment how hot the zombie girls are if you put a bag on their head. Another soldier openly questions how he got past the psych eval.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the Dark World Great Fairy has a monstrous face due to Ganon's curse.
  • The Great Fairies from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask have long legs, large (albeit strangely-shaped, due to the low processing power of the Nintendo 64) breasts, and no clothing but vines. Despite this, their noses are large and misshapen, they each have a single mole on the side of their face, and their mouths are cartoonishly large. All of which is mostly an issue brought about by the N64's graphics limitations; when this Great Fairy design was used in Hyrule Warriors, the much stronger Wii U eliminated the effect.
• The Wraith enemies in Darksiders II. When the very first one shows up, the camera is focused on her shapely butt, then slowly pans up and around to give the player a good view of her figure before revealing that she has the facial features of the other undead enemies in the area.
• Assassin's Creed III: Based on Kenway's experience, this is Benjamin Franklin's opinion of old women. Luckily, open five-sided pulped wood containers make this a non-problem. This is one of eight of Franklin's horrifying reasons to date them anyway.
• Clover in PAYDAY 2 was made with the trope in mind due to the player base wanting to avoid the stereotypical hot female action character many video games use. Bonnie and Joy were also made in a similar fashion, the former having Delinquent Hair, the latter having a Tom Boy motif. Sydney and Hila are the only ones that could be considered "Attractive", though this is down to sharing their faces with their VA's, Sydney has Georgia Van Cuylenberg, and Hila has Hila Klein)
• Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind While investigating the high school where the murder victim attended, you come across a young female tennis player who you initially talk to from a considerable distance. Her being this far away in contrast to most people you talk to confuses the Player Character, and so when he asks her to come closer after thinking she must be cute... she turns out to have an extremely ugly and weaselly face, and is also implied to have a crush on your character. He’s suitably horrified.
• The Sirens from the God of War series are depicted as floating, beautiful girls with large breasts, but their heads are mostly hair and a gaping, fanged Lamprey Mouth. This is better seen with the Siren Widows from the second game, who keep their hair in a bun, allowing you to see that their only facial feature are the maws. The ones from Ascension have a more humanoid face, coupled with a hideously large, fanged mouth.
• In Bendy and the Ink Machine, you have the living toon, Alice Angel, from chapter 3. From the neck down, she has the body of a curvaceous woman with an hourglass build. From the chin up, she's Two-Faced, with both equally bad — the left half distorted like it's been badly burned, the right so smooth and toony that it hits the Uncanny Valley — and has a lopsided halo visibly growing out the left side of her skull.
• This trope is discussed in Battlefield: Bad Company. Most of the squad, Sweetwater in particular, expresses adoration for Mike-One-Juliet based on nothing but the sound of her voice. Eventually, however, Haggard questions whether that automatically means she's physically as beautiful as Sweetwater imagines, noting that he has a cousin with a beautiful voice "but a face like a can of dog food".
  Sweetwater: Wasn't she the one you dated?
  Haggard: Yeah.
  Sweetwater: ...Cool.
• Scythian Witch-Harpies in Serious Sam 3: BFE look like very hot women with wings for arms and exposed breasts, even up close. That is until they open their mouths◊. Then they show that their heads aren't even human, more like a red-skinned raptor wearing headgear in the visage of a human woman's head. The Witch-Harpy's breasts are detailed by NETRICSA as having no mammary function, so all they are is Schmuck Bait to horny humans.
• The Mother Harlot from the Shin Megami Tensei franchise appears to have the body of a beautiful woman, but being a Fiend gives her the standard Skull for a Head all Fiends share. In her debut appearance in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, she initially faces away from the Demi-Fiend before turning around and revealing her face right before the battle starts.
• Altasgracias of Blasphemous is an attractive, naked, Giant Woman... with three faces horiffically fused onto one head and a beard that could make a wizard jealous. She was originally three sisters who were all forced into unwanted marriages, and prayed to the Grievous Miracle for a way out of them. Well, they got one.
• Inverted by Fragile in Death Stranding. She has a young, attractive face while her body is extremely withered and aged. Everything from her neck down was exposed to Timefall, water that induces Rapid Aging, which created the contrast.
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons has the painting "Beauty Looking Back", which is a Real Life example of using this trope. The painting's title in Japanese is a phrase more accurately meaning "this is a woman who is only beautiful when seen from behind".
• Pseudo-Palutena from Kid Icarus: Uprising looks exactly like Palutena... until her mask of beauty is destroyed, revealing her grotesque, zombie-like real face.
• LISA: The First: Played for drama in the secret ending. The last tape Lisa can obtain transports her to a void that's empty aside from a woman seen from behind. The woman apologises to Lisa, but when she turns around to face her, she has the face of Marty, Lisa's abusive dad. As Lisa has been encountering nearly nothing but instances of Marty in her dreamscape and the tape is called "Mom's Tape" in the files, this represents Lisa's trauma overwriting even the distant memory of her long-gone mother.

Webcomics

• A Cyanide and Happiness comic shows a classic example of this trope, as a man walks past while a woman, viewed only from behind, bends over to pick up the papers she dropped. Then she turns around.
• Luna of Dominic Deegan got this sort of response from Siggy, even though her face is fine, and from several supporting characters. She has orc tusks because of a curse.
• The bride in the "Maid Maleen" retelling in Erstwhile, while in possession of a nice figure and gorgeous hair, has a long, pointy nose and a massive unibrow, explaining why she hides her face behind a veil and makes the heroine Maleen take her place at the wedding ceremony.
• The main character Leez in Kubera. Although she's normally drawn the same as the other characters, that's just Generic Cuteness turned to her benefit (explicitly) because she's the main character. Everyone in the story treats her as ugly as sin, and every once in a while the author draws her "normally," resulting in her looking like a gonk.
• In the Heroes tie in online graphic novels, Company agent Penny Logan has a nice enough figure but a face that causes her mother (who has the power to shapeshift other people) to give her a different one for the purpose of her scoring a date once. Whether her face is just a bit plain next to the other characters or has lips that are too thin, cheeks too wide, a nose that's too big or some combination of the three is Depending on the Artist.
• Thelma of Nip and Tuck, in her original appearance, is implied to be this. She Cleans Up Nicely, though.
• Wonderella describes Earth as this in The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. She has a point.
• Sister Germany in Scandinavia and the World. She has one of the most buxom figures among the female cast, but the author describes her face as not very pretty. She even has a moustache!

Web Originals

• One Cracked article about words in other languages that we really need in English has a Japanese word for this, the aforementioned "bakku-shan".
• When The Dark Id's Let's Play of Drakengard reaches the "Goddess" boss fight, he can best describe her as "Butterholyfuckwhatiswrongwitheverythingbelowtheneck."
• Manga Soprano:
  • "I was forcibly taken to the pool by a woman with a great figure.But she was ugly face, so ..." [sic]: Maki has a great body and cute eyes but wears a mask to hide her manly, ugly face from the eyes down.
  • "A woman with a great style but not a great face tried to stand out at a wedding": Mayu is a friend of Ram's from school and is quite confident in her attractive body. However, she has a long chin that makes her face look masculine.
  • "A misunderstood woman who pretends to be a lover when she is not even in a relationship": Misato has a nice body, but her face is full of wrinkles. She tries to act cute around her male coworkers, but they are grossed out.
  • "The tragedy of a misunderstood woman who can't stop boasting about her beautiful hair,": Sarah has an attractive body and luscious hair, charming any man who looked at her from behind until she turned to face them, which scared them off because her face looked, in Haru's words, "like a Noh mask."
  • "The result of a junior who pretended to be drunk at a company drinking party clung to a man…": Minami has an attractive body and will take every opportunity to brag about it while comparing her senior coworker Kanade to herself. However, once she takes off her mask to seduce Alto, it's revealed her face is unattractive from the nose down.
  • "When a beautiful woman with outstanding style takes off her mask for a meal…": Ruri has an attractive body and likes to flaunt it while mocking her friend Haru for her "toddler-like" body. However, when she takes off her mask, it reveals a grotesque overbite that drives guys away in disgust.
  • "When a woman who boasts of style takes off her mask, the shock develops": Saki has an attractive body and misunderstands boys whenever they help her, acting as if they fell in love with her. When they went to the pool, she bragged about how beautiful she was and sought to have Narita as her boyfriend while mocking Haru's underdeveloped body. However, once her mask slipped off on the waterslide, it exposed her ugly face.
  • "Teacher Brags About Her Nice Body → But When A New Teacher Tells Her Something Shocking…": Coach Miyu always wore a cap and goggles in swimming class while flaunting her attractive body, acting sweet around the male students and picking on female students' appearances whenever the latter group complained about her unprofessional behavior. However, when her cap and goggles come off after she fell into the pool, her ugly face is revealed and the boys who previously fawned over her become repulsed by her face.
• In the Strong Bad Email "different town", Strong Bad imagines replacing Homsar with a "modestly hot" female version. Modestly Hot Homsar has a voluptuous body, but still has no arms and a slighty-feminine version of Homsar's cartoony face.
  Strong Bad: Modestly hot, my eye!
• The fourth "ssenmodnaR" video by SMG4 shows Princess Peach as well as various sexy women with an old man's face.
• Carly Jean-Dooley in Survival of the Fittest version four is described this way.
• The cs188 YouTube Poop "Pooping the Charts Vol. 7 - Why Can't I Think Of A Title" does this with Justin Bieber. Literally for about a second.

Western Animation

• In the Screwy Squirrel short Big Heel-Watha, the chief's daughter is one of these...but turns out to be Red wearing an ugly mask.
  • A similar switch happens in the Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Socko in Morocco. Woody and Buzz Buzzard fight over a harem girl; in the end Buzz lifts the veil to see a horridly ugly face. Woody finds out after Buzz gives up that the face was a mask and she's really beautiful.
  • In another Woody Woodpecker short, Buster's Last Stand, an Indian tries to grab Woody's scalp to get the hand of the Indian Chief's daughter, in the end, after getting it, the father gradually shows his daughter with a curtain at the end, an ugly face appears.
  • Another Avery Droopy cartoon, The Chump Champ, has the Queen of Sports, who looks shapely from the neck down, but is a literal dog from the neck up.
    • Technically, they were all literal dogs...but this one was a dog in more ways than one. She also became an Abhorrent Admirer at the end.
• In the American Dad! episode "Helping Handis", Steve grows a pair of breasts as a result of a steroid pill given to him by his dad Stan. When Steve revealed his newly developed breasts to Stan, Klaus (who was next to Stan at the time) says "Talk about a butterface".
• In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Interfection," Meatwad encountered a pop-up ad that had bikini clad women with men's faces.
  Master Shake: Listen to me, Meatwad. Is it hot girl-on-girl action?
  Meatwad: Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're girls. But this one looks kinda strong.
• Curare, a villain from Batman Beyond, has a rather nice body. But apparently she wears the mask for reasons besides stealth. When Terry sees her without it, he looks rather repulsed, though we don't get to see it. Here is the concept art◊.
• Mrs. Manface from Batman: The Brave and the Bold is a woman with the face of a man with a huge, stubbly chin.
• In the Bob's Burgers, Linda uses the term to refer to a mechanical shark used as a prop in an old Jaws Captain Ersatz.
• Inverted in the Brickleberry episode "Hello Dottie". When Woody outsources most of his employees' jobs to India (as in he has the work done by robots which are being remote controlled from India), Steve falls in love with one of the outsource workers, whose face is shown on a monitor mounted on the robot. Eventually, he decides to fly to India to meet her in person. When he arrives, he discovers that below her beautiful face, she is grossly overweight, with hairy man arms. Steve promptly heads back to America.
• Gravitina in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is a Blue-Skinned Space Babe except for her enormous cranium, which she was mocked for that lead her to villainy.
• An inversion occurs on CatDog. Cat and Dog get sucked into a space opera movie and must rescue the Damsel in Distress, who communicates with them via monitor and has a beautiful face. When they do rescue her, they finally see the rest of her body, which consists of slimy green tentacles—and Cat is less than thrilled when she insists on showering him with kisses.
• Ms. Demeanor of C.O.P.S. (1988) is a tall, muscular yet full-figured woman with a less than attractive face, sporting pronounced cheekbones, a narrow and pointy chin, and cruel eyes. It was even a plot point in one story in the comics: she was originally a beautiful woman who was going to marry Berserko, but an experiment by Dr. Badvibes gave her the face she has in the cartoon, which made her so ugly that Berserko called the wedding off in disgust.
• In the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode "Stormy Weather", Courage comes across a french couple kissing each other with the woman's face hidden behind the man's. She looks very attractive at first glance, until they stop kissing and her horrific face is revealed (Her boyfriend doesn't seem to mind though).
• Bleh from Drawn Together, who's basically identical to Princess Clara but has a blatant set of Fish Eyes.
• Played with in the "About Face" episode of Duckman, in which the titular character develops a strong rapport with a 911 operator with a silky voice. Upon meeting up for drinks, he discovers that she's this - but simply shoots out the lights because he's growing to care about her. After even Fluffy & Uranus react negatively to her, she decides to get cosmetic surgery and becomes the full package - drop-dead gorgeous and very sweet. The episode ends with Duckman deciding that he's not good enough for her, so he breaks up with her and refuses to answer her phone calls.
• Family Guy:
  • In an episode Quagmire approaches a hottie at a bar, she turns around, and we (and he) discover that she's carrying all her fat in the front and has a terrible face. She turns away again and Quagmire is about to hit on her again, but then reminds himself of what he saw the first time. Meg later receives a similar treatment from another guy.
  • In the episode "Boys Do Cry", Peter says: "You can't ask me to make dinner, Lois. That's like asking me to choose between Sarah Jessica Parker and Kirsten Dunst in a hot body/weird face contest. It can't be done."
    • Even more to the point, in reference to late-night Cinemax: "There was one on last night where the girl had a butt face but her breasts was immaculate."
  • Another episode had Meg join the Baton Squad in school, after being rejected as a cheerleader. The squad contains all unattractive girls...and one perfectly acceptable looking one. Meg asks her why she's in the group, and when she opens her mouth a super-long tongue rolls out.
  • In the episode "Scammed Yankees", Brian accidentally sees Patty, one of Meg's lame friends (frizzy red hair, glasses and braces) undress, and finds out that she has a beautiful body.
• Futurama:
  • In the pilot, Leela is introduced this way, as Fry only sees her from behind until she turns around, revealing her single, giant eye. Since she looks perfectly "normal" otherwise (better, in fact) it doesn't bother him (or the audience) for long. However, notwithstanding the show's Generic Cuteness, in-universe she's generally treated as the horrifying Uncanny Valley exemplar that someone with her features would be in Real Life.
    Elderly Nightclub Janitor: My, my, my, what's a beautiful lady like you—Ew! Oh, sorry, I thought you had two eyes.
  • Male inversion in "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love": While at the gym, Amy flirts with a man who is in a steam cabinet. When the man walks out, it's revealed that despite having a handsome face he has a grotesquely obese body.
  • In one episode, when Zapp encounters a genderswapped Fry, he thinks most of her is attractive.
    Zapp: Well, hello from the neck down!
• A particularly extreme example is given with Spydra, the main villain of Gadget Boy & Heather. Her body is very shapely, and while her face is never seen uncovered, it is established that she wears a mask because her actual face is hideous enough to turn whoever sees it into stone.
• Garfield and Friends: The U.S. Acres cartoon "The Ugly Duckling" has Wade Duck in the title role, and is so hideous he has to wear a paper bag over his head to hide his "ugly face". He ultimately weaponizes it when the bag comes off, as his face is so ugly, it frightens and repulses the Wicked Witch of the Wool and her Lackeys. This actually gives him the confidence to be proud of his ugliness from then on... and it doesn't hurt that he has thousands of 'He's so ugly' jokes about himself to use up.
• Gary the Rat takes this to a while new level: Mr. Stiletto's goddaughter Angel has a lean, lithe and attractive body... but her hideous face resembles a bulge-eyed fish-lizard with a huge mouth.
• In He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983), arch-villain Skeletor has the physique of a body-builder and the face of a skeleton.
• Hey Arnold!: Helga Pataki inherited her father's face while her sister got the good stuff from their mom. And that's the least of Helga's problems.
• Parodied insanely in Korgoth of Barbaria. After Orala is hit in the head with Specules' Eye Beams and Specules is later killed, Korgoth goes over to check up on the apparently-dead Orala... who now has Specules' head on her shoulders. He even asks Korgoth, "What's the matter, doncha want me anymore?"
• The Looney Tunes short "A Gander at Mother Goose" uses this gag in the short's take on Little Miss Muffett. Miss Muffett is depicted as a curvaceous woman viewed from the back who turns out to have a comically ugly face, resulting in her frightening the spider away rather than the other way around.
• Rick and Morty has a downplayed example with Summer Smith. Her face, while not (outright) ugly, is less attractive than her body, and nobody comments on it (she takes after her dad rather than her very conventionally pretty mother).
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: The episode "Magical Golden Singing Cheeses" has one of the most literal examples, as the ending has two cheeses transform into princesses with shapely bodies, but featureless lumps of milk curd for faces; the duo were forced to marry them.
• Anyone who wears The Mask tends to get this, as their heads tend to get all cartoony and green-skinned on them:
  • Stanley Ipkiss, the Mask's most prominent wearer, has a very good-looking body along with wearing clothes that do look nice on him, but he is bald, got cartoony eyes, no ears and buck teeth. It is somewhat downplayed as he is very easy looking even with all of that and he is still a Nice Guy as well, so the girls get attracted to him because of it.
  • Masked Eve has a very good-looking body as she's slender, and has huge boobs and slim legs too, but her face has questionable-looking makeup on such as red lips and blue eyelids. She also turns her lips to comedic size which can put people off along with cartoony eyes and buck teeth. Then again, her being a nice girl is enough to make up for it as Stanley does find her very attractive even if he thinks that her face is off-putting (mostly because it's green headed).
  • Masked Dr. Neuman wears nice clothes along with having hair that goes straight up as well which can make him attractive, but like the above examples he also has buck teeth, cartoony eyes and a bald patch. The fact that he's also a psychopath doesn't really help matters.
• In She-Ra: Princess of Power, Shadow Weaver has a shapely figure, delicate hands (usually), toned, slender arms... and a (concealed) face that revolts Hordak. Apparently it was the price of her power. A flashback to her younger years before she turned to the dark side showed that her face used to be beautiful.
• Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go: Zig-Zagging Trope with the Princess in "World of Giants". At first, she appears as a beautiful, giant woman wearing a veil that hides her face. When she removes her veil and reveals to the heroes (and us) just how hideous she is, her body (somehow) transforms from slender and curvaceous to ugly and overweight to match her unattractive face.
• Barb from Sym-Bionic Titan, in contrast to her curvaceous figure.
• In Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • During a sort of Music Video of "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)," Buster falls for a mermaid who hides most of her face in her hair until they're in a Tunnel of Love.
  • Pulled in another episode where Plucky appears in a video for the They Might Be Giants cover of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)." He plays a private detective hired by an Arabian-style sheik to recover a priceless artifact. Among the many possible rewards are the sheik's daughter's hand in marriage, and she has a bangin' body but her face his hidden behind a veil. Plucky succeeds and returns, only for the beautiful woman to turn out to be...Elmyra!
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Hunter, post sex change operation. Body of a supermodel, same face as when he was a dude.
  • Anna Baldavich is a Take Our Word for It example. Her face is never shown, but when she asks Brock Samson to make love to her (after Bud Manstrong, the only other crew member on Gargantua One for all this time, refused to satisfy her), he agrees, but only if she wears her spacesuit helmet.
  • Myra has a very hot body, especially given her Spy Catsuit, but her face, with sharp cheekbones, wide eyes, and lines, reflects her insane personality.
• In a second season episode of Voltron: Legendary Defender, Lance and Hunk are invited by a city of mermaids and mermen to have some dinner and enjoy a show. What looks like a dancing mermaid behind a curtain (which gets Lance grinning) turns out to be an octopus with a smaller octopus on top of its head. Lance's reaction turns from delight to disgust. Inverted at the end of the episode, where one of the rebelling mermaids gives Lance a kiss on the cheek. Since she has a jellyfish covering her head to protect her mind, Lance is at first reluctant, but removing the jellyfish to reveal her beautiful face makes him change his mind immediately.
• Yogi's Space Race: From the "Galaxy Goof-Ups", the space disco segments show a woman with a human body and a bizarre alien face that changes forms as she dances.

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