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Impossible Hourglass Figure

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Impossible Hourglass Figure (trope)
"How'd you come up with the [bottle's] design?"
"It just came to me, from who knows where!"

"If she was real, with that teeny waist, and the top and the bottom, they would just fall over. [laughs] It's not possible!"
Richard Williams, animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, talking about Jessica Rabbit.

A woman in comics or cartoons doesn't need to have a proper ribcage like a real actress does. Therefore, she can easily have a much narrower waist than would be possible with even the strictest of corsets — and usually without even wearing one! Not only is it shown as an unproblematic part of how she just happens to look, but she is supposed to be considered more attractive because of it.

This is based on the "hourglass figure" beauty ideal, where a woman is considered attractive if she has big breasts, a narrow waist, and wide hips. The narrow waist not only appeals to a cultural preference for thinness, but also makes the breasts look bigger and the hips look wider by comparison. The attainability of similar proportions in real life depends a lot on personal genetics, but the medium of drawing allows an exaggerated archetype to be portrayed without the restraints of biology. A woman with an IHF is always designed to be attractive, even in the cases where she's not Ms. Fanservice or a Head-Turning Beauty: Monsters with insect-like narrow waists do not count, even if the shape reminds one of an hourglass.

The Spear Counterpart to this trope would be the classic male Bodybuilding "V-taper" or "X-frame": instead of big breasts, narrow waist, and wide hips, the ideal is to have broad shoulders and lats, a narrow waist and pelvis, and muscular thighs that bulge outward to form the bottom of the X. As with female anatomy, this ratio can be ludicrously exaggerated in cartoons. The cartoon bodybuilder or Hunk is often a Top-Heavy Guy, with a torso shaped like an upside-down triangle that seems to explode out of a tiny waist like a genie bursting out of the bottle. An Amazonian Beauty or Brawn Hilda may also have this build.

While a truly cartoonish version is unlikely in real life without dangerous procedures such as surgical removal of the lower ribs, some women have at least a downplayed version through a combination of diet, exercise, and genetic traits related to skeletal proportions and body fat distribution. Even at this level it’s not very common; breast size and hip sweep mostly consists of body fat, and having enough body fat for impressively curvy breasts and hips tends to go hand in hand with at least some fat storage in the midsection. It is rare for someone to be an exception, and ever rarer for it to occur without surgical aid like liposuction or implants. Ironically, some people who are born with it end up getting corrective surgery such as breast reduction for practical reasons: fat being applied disproportionately across the body can cause inconveniences in movement, be a constant source of unwanted attention, or even be a long-term or immediate health risk. None of these issues exist in cartoon land, but in the real world, it's a tragic textbook example of being Blessed with Suck.

For the garment which allows people who don’t naturally have an IHF to mold their bodies closer to the ideal, see Of Corsets Sexy and Of Corset Hurts. Male crossdressers, Transgender women, or even cisgender women who just feel too thin can also use Fake Boobs, and/or similar padding about the hips to help with this. Other tropes involve some of the same attributes but go for a different result. Noodle People don't just have thin waists, but their entire torsos as well as their limbs are elongated and thin. Contrast Pettanko (which is what most thin women are when not nursing). When other characters notice a woman with the IHF, they might say that she has Curves in All the Right Places.

Not to be confused with literally having an hourglass for a body.

noreallife


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Played straight with Ms. Carolina in the 2015 film Crayon Shin-chan: My Moving Story! Cactus Large Attack!. Her curvaceous figure causes Shinnosuke to become enamored with her.
  • Lust of Fullmetal Alchemist has a quite slim waist framed by voluptuous curves. Justified as she's a homunculus, not a human, and is the living embodiment of the sin she's named for.
  • One Piece:
    • Boa Hancock, Nico Robin, and Nami, for starters, or for that matter pretty much every single female in the entire universe who is not horrendously obese. One would get the idea that this is one of the author's many fancies.
    • An unverified rumor is that this is mostly due to Eiichiro Oda venting his horniness over his wife (who is a model) whom he married during the run of his manga, because most females at the beginning of the manga (including Nami) were simply thin, not curvy. In 2016, Oda admitted that his usual method of drawing women is "two circles and an X", with the X obviously being the waistline.
  • Musuko ga Kawaikute Shikataganai Mazoku no Hahaoya: Many of the adult female demons are incredibly busty relative to their waist sizes, as emphasized by Lorem's loosely hanging t-shirt and Merii's snugly fitting sweaters. The few female demons who don't possess such a figure often suffer from A-Cup Angst, such as Valentine, or are just too young for it come up yet, like preteens Lizette and Dolores.
  • Rebuild World: While there are other busty girls in the slum city, Alpha stands out as being the most curvaceous character in the story, with enormous boobs, a tiny waist, and wide hips. Justified by her being an AI able to freely change her appearance via Augmented Reality and specifically choosing her form to appeal to Akira's tastes despite his apparent lack of interest in sex due to his age.
  • Played for Body Horror with Samara from 3×3 Eyes: due to bonding with Juuma (essentially, Mon-type creatures that feeds on the host' life energy but will fight for him) in spite of being a human, she ended up with a deformed body: her arms are now two actual Juuma, while her midsection is horribly dried up and thin compared to normal.
  • Kayoh from Pandemonium Wizard Village.

    Comic Books 
  • Madame Mirage was specifically designed in-universe to have this body type — her real identity is a small, athletic blonde with a body as flat as a board from every angle, so (with the help of hologram technology) she disguises as a tall, "impossibly-endowed brunette" based on her dead sister. It's also hinted that there's at least some degree of wish fulfillment behind the Madame Mirage persona's appearance.
  • Just about any female character drawn by Rob Liefeld will look like she has absolutely no organs in her lower torso, while also having large breasts. It almost borders on parody until you realise that's just how he does art.
  • A Spider-Man cover depicting Mary Jane in an awkward pose has underwent Memetic Mutation for violating any sense of anatomy in the name of Male Gaze. Aside from her sitting pose, her midsection is so skinny it's a wonder her body manages to hold up those huge boobs. Black Cat gets a similar look.
  • Argentinian cartoonist Guillermo Divito popularized in the pages of magazine Rico Tipo a very specific kind of girl drawing known as "Divito Girls", which are archetypically of this body type. They even influenced the fashion of the time and are considered an early example of sexual revolution depictions in Argentina and Uruguay.

    Comic Strips 
  • All the women in Li'l Abner, except Mammy Yokum.

    Fan Works 
  • Becoming Female: When Harry becomes a girl, he's described as having large boobs, curves in all the right places, and a skinny waist. He actually lampshades it; Hermione responds by guessing that the potion turned him into "the ideal female form".
  • In Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen, Tiaa describes herself this way.
  • Willow from My Immortal is described as being "Thin enuff 2 b anorexic" but with "really big bobs"
  • Olga from The Night Unfurls is described by Kyril's P.O.V. to have "a voluptuous body covered by an elegant corset". Considering her design in Kuroinu canon (which encapsulates the entire package of big breasts, narrow waist, and wide hips), he is clearly understating her physical appearance.
  • The protagonist of many a Reader-Insert Fic has this figure, despite being supposedly a neutral stand-in for the reader.

    Fashion Design 
  • This Stella McCartney dress creates the optical illusion that the wearer has one of these.
  • Fashion from Victorian Britain seems to have been striving towards this at times, with all the corsets and hoop skirts and whatnot.note 
    • A popular trick on how the Victorians make the waist appear thinner in photographs is through warping or painting over the waist with the background color. They also used silhouette tricks, like wide sleeves and skirts, to trick the eye into seeing a smaller waist than its real size.
    • Dior's New Look replicated this look as well, it was claimed that Christian Dior found waistlines above 18 inches to be "disgusting" (although looking at images of his models, it's difficult to believe that they ALL had waists that small).
  • Barbie is notorious for this. The reason this is under fashion design: the narrow waist is allegedly intended to compensate for the heavy seams in such small clothing. Whether this is actually true or not, around 2000 Mattel chose to switch to a wider waist design.

    Films — Animation 
  • Disney Animated Canon:
    • Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. Along with Ariel, she has the most exaggerated figure of any Disney Princess or heroine. Bonus points for actually getting trapped in an hourglass.
      • Also the harem girls in "Friend Like Me", the belly dancer and the girls in "Prince Ali" ... let's just say there's a lot of pretty girls in sheer, low-cut fabric.
    • The Bimbettes trio from Beauty and the Beast are all big-breasted and tiny-waisted to a cartoony extent in comparison to Belle's more natural physique. This is also underscored by Belle being the most attractive woman in town despite lacking this figure.
    • Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989) has a very slim hourglass figure, both as a mermaid and a human.
    • Four of the muses and Aphrodite, from Hercules (1997), have waists so tiny they could probably wrap one hand around them. Oddly enough, Megara ends up with wide hips, despite being the only female to make use of her womanly charms.
    • Mad Madame Mim sports this when she makes herself pretty in The Sword in the Stone.
  • Both main female characters, Maria and La Muerte from The Book of Life.
  • Boys Night Out: Thanks to the cartoony art direction of the short, most of the woman in this short have thin waists, big boobs, and generous butts.
  • Coco: Justified with Dem Bones, seeing as they don't really have waists; it's practically standard for the Land of the Dead to have hilariously waspish dresses, cinched around their spinal columns.
  • Holli Would from Cool World.
  • Miss Forcible, in her youth, and the Other Miss Forcible from the film version of Coraline
  • The Wicked Stepmother Frieda and the kind, lovely, beautiful, comely, cute and pretty Ella from Happily N'Ever After.
  • Francesca from Mad Monster Party?.
  • Most if not all the adult females in the 2022 Netflix Marmaduke.
  • Sita from Sita Sings the Blues, to accentuate her feminine loveliness and contrast her with her husband Rama, who is an equally exaggeratedly Top-Heavy Guy.
  • Lola Bunny from Space Jam has a waistline with less circumference than either thigh, sandwiched between wide hips and enough bustline to send The Nostalgia Critic into histrionics. She's perfectly aware of this, always garbed in a midriff-baring outfit, and flaunting her Sexy Silhouette during the Tune Squad introductions.
    Announcer: At small forward, standing a scintillating three foot two, the heartthrob of the hoops: Lola Bunny!
  • The famous unfinished animated film The Thief and the Cobbler provides a pretty remarkable example with Princess Yum-Yum.
  • Mrs. Toad from Thumbelina who has huge Non-Mammal Mammaries on top of a near nonexistent waist, and wide hips to match.
  • Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the more famous and extreme cases of this trope. She was originally designed with more (relatively speaking) realistic proportions, but the creators decided that they wanted an unrealistic quality about her sexiness. She's a toon, after all.
  • The Princess in The True Story of Puss 'N Boots has this body type, complete with a large bust and wide hips. It doesn't really help that the human characters look somewhat realistic, thus making her look a little strange.
  • We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story: Cecilia’s mother (only shown in still pictures) sports such a figure when we first see her in a vacation photo; her huge breasts and hips are visibly straining in her tight bikini, and her waist is barely twice as wide as her neck. (The other pictures of her at the end of the film give her a less exaggerated character design, with a more normal-sized bust but keeping the tiny waist and big hips.)

    Literature 
  • Deconstructed in Body By Harmani. The woman had herself genetically altered to have a designer's body. One of the alternations involve this. Unfortunately, it's dangerous to her health since her internal organs are wedged in tight and she has to do constant exercises just to move at all.
  • In Bubble World, everyone on Bubble World has a perfect body, causing major shock for Freesia when she enters the real world and sees that not only does everyone seem fat, so does she.
  • In Little House on the Prairie, it's mentioned several times that when Laura's parents married, her father could span her mother's waist with his hands, thanks to her rigid regimen of waist training (see under Fashion Design). When Laura first hears this as a child, she's impressed, but later she comes to think it somewhat silly, pointing out that Pa still seems to like Ma an awful lot even though he can't span her waist with his hands anymore. In later books, Laura and Mary are also expected to practice extreme tight-lacing and waist training (and presumably the same would eventually become true for Carrie and Grace, they're just not old enough yet); Laura complies because she's not inclined to disobey her parents, but her internal monologue makes it clear she hates and resents it.
  • Sex Robots and Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman: the author visits the RealDoll sex doll factory, and notices that despite the wide variety of face type, skin tone and bust size, all of the dolls have the same tiny waist.
  • Under the Pendulum Sun: The Fae Queen Mab invokes this with one of her outfits, giving herself an inhumanly tiny waist that's corseted in black-and-gold and skirted in literal wasp wings.
    Mab: I read that a wasp waist is the very height of fashion.

    Live-Action TV 
  • An episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia actually deconstructs this trope. Dennis takes up fashion designing, and specifically designs his clothes for someone with an exaggerated hourglass figure. Of course, since no one in real life actually has one...
  • The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", the women's version of "The Transformation" — a surgical procedure that every person undergoes to make them "beautiful" (and all exactly alike) — leaves them with this type of figure.

    Magazines 
  • The Humorama digest line featured cartoon women drawn by Dan Decarlo and Bill Ward. Their women definitely fit this trope.

    Pinball 
  • The woman standing next to Spock on the playfield for Bally's Star Trek pinball has a waist only slightly wider than her head.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The female characters from Kingdom Death have these proportions, most notably the pinup variants. It appears to be a trademark of the artist, Lokman Lam.

    Video Games 

    Web Animation 
  • Various vtubers have figures like these, but the queen of them all is most likely Saa. She has large breasts and incredibly broad hips, the latter being especially massive. Saa herself is gleefully aware of her figure and happily draws attention to them. She later updated her model to make her hips even wider to the point of ridiculousness.
  • Martha, IMP's target in the Helluva Boss episode "Murder Family". This might be why, even though she's married and her home decor is littered with signs of her and her family being a Cannibal Clan, she doesn't seem to have trouble finding sexual partners.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • This picture from Wikipedia. It's called "Condition of Cut-in Waist".
  • Escher Girls posts and mocks some pretty jarring examples of this or illustrations with just the impossibly small waists. Most of the works do this in spite of having an otherwise realistic art-style.

    Western Animation 
  • Hello Nurse from Animaniacs. Parodied in Wakko's Wish where she designs a bottle for Scratchansniff's elixir that is said to be popular because of its more attractive shape. The bottle happens to have a shape similar to Hello Nurse's curvaceous figure as seen on the picture above.
    • Most women in the show that would be considered attractive had tiny waists.
  • Black Widow from Avengers Assemble especially in season 2. Zarda also counts as well during her close ups.
  • Harley Quinn in Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode where she dresses like a flapper.
  • Betty Boop was described in a 1934 court case as: "combin[ing] in appearance the childish with the sophisticated — a large round baby face with big eyes and a nose like a button, framed in a somewhat careful coiffure, with a very small body of which perhaps the leading characteristic is the most self-confident little bust imaginable.".
  • Clarice from the Chip 'n Dale classic cartoons managed to get away with both having generous hips and an ample bosom, and little in between.
  • Elise from Dan Vs..
  • Danny Phantom has Maddie Fenton, who has a large bust and hips to hold up a narrow waist, and Desiree, who has the largest bust-waist-hip ratio of the entire show.
  • Morgana Macawber from Darkwing Duck.
  • Virtually every female in the DC Animated Universe. Bruce Timm clearly loves him some hourglass curves. Some examples:
    • In this episode of Justice League, Barda's figure is pretty unrealistic. (Of course, she isn't human, as many fans soon forget.)
    • Plastique's waist in JLU episode "Task Force X" is so ridiculously narrow that she can wear a 1-2 inch thick fake skin over it to hide her plastic explosives for the mission, and her waist still looks slim.
  • Dennis' mother, Alice Mitchell, from Dennis the Menace.
  • Panty the Panther from El Arca.
  • Princess Mandie from The Fairly OddParents!.
    • Vicky gets one in "Channel Chasers" when she uses Timmy's magic TV remote to age herself to 18 years old.
  • Princess Aura from The New Adventures of Flash Gordon.
  • Turanga Leela from Futurama. She's even been described as having 36-24-36 body measurements, the supposed "perfect" female body.
  • Pete's wife and Pistol and PJ's mother, Peg from Goof Troop is probably among the curviest females in Disney history, with hips wider than her shoulders and a bust that, whilst not as wide as her hips, still exceeds her shoulders.
  • Cousin Mel from Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. She's got quite a curvy figure and is very buxom (which is probably the only reason the cartoon is remembered), which adds well to the fanservice. I. M. Slime has quite the figure also, just not to Cousin Mel's extreme.
  • Miss Information and Lydia Karaoke from Histeria!.
  • Jez from Jimmy Two-Shoes.
  • Jorel's Brother: The titular characters' mother, Danuza, has a curvy body and wide hips. Also, in "Aterrorizante Vida Adulta", Lara's adult form has a similar body type.
  • Kaeloo: The women in men's magazines on the show have extremely narrow waists when compared to the rest of their body proportions.
  • Certain female characters from Kim Possible. Notably, Shego and Bonnie Rockwaller as the most prominent examples among recurring characters.
  • The Looney Tunes cartoon, "A Star is Hatched" has a quick scene of a caricature of Mae West coming out of a dressing room door shaped like hourglass that matches her figure.
  • Wilhamena, Enid's mother, in OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes.
  • Phineas and Ferb:
    • Vanessa. She's the only female non-adult character in the show with serious curves and her outfit hugs them tightly.
    • All the background dancer in Doof's musical.
    • When Candace is shown as an adult, her figure has gone from literally pencil-straight to improbable hourglass. The mother of three has wide hips naturally enough, but unnaturally has a thinner waist than her much lighter teenage self.
  • Marci McFist in Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja has a very slim waist supported with a large bust and equally large hips.
  • Angelina Kerplopolis-Awesome, mother of Les Awesome and Thera Kerplopolis-Awesome, from Rated "A" for Awesome.
  • Charlotte Pickles from Rugrats appears to be the most conventionally attractive woman of the show.
  • One episode of Samurai Jack featured the Sirens. You know you have a winner when you realize that even their arms are thicker than their waists!
  • Anita Knight and nearly all of the female characters from The Secret Show waists are basically non-existent.
  • Kimmy from Sym-Bionic Titan. She's got plenty of curves and evidently likes to show them off.
  • "Red" (or "Lou") from Tex Avery's cartoons.
  • Eris from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. Justified because she's a goddess.
  • Miss Sara Bellum and Sedusa from The Powerpuff Girls (1998).
  • Trudy Proud from The Proud Family. Also Suga Mama on one episode when she lost weight before her wedding.
  • Agent K in The Replacements, in spite of her more angular design, is built with curves, with a skinny waist to correspond to her large bust with an equally large backside to match.
  • Tangled: The Series: Unlike the original film, Rapunzel's figure is noticeably curvy.
  • Virtually every girl on Total Drama, especially Lindsay. In fact it's easier to list the one's who aren't: Beth, Leshawna, Sadie, Jo, Staci, Sugar, Millie and Revival!Emma. Lindsay, however, is apparently, the most attractive female character on the show.
  • The entire Winx Club. They have really wide hips supported by narrow waists. Their hips get even wider from seasons 5 onward, when the show Art Shifted to Flash animation.
    • Some older characters like Faragonda have thinner waists too, only it's not as exaggerated as the younger characters.

 
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