Hot in Human Form

The potion did advertise "beauty divine"...

Non-human characters in fiction are not often seen as attractive to human characters in-universe outside of an Interspecies Romance. Hot in Human Form is what happens when a non-human character either voluntarily or involuntarily takes on a human form that is viewed as very attractive in-universe by the human characters.

If the transformation is only temporary, it allows for a high-profile Cameo.

Related Tropes: A sort of trans-species Beautiful All Along or Ugly All Along, depending on which form is the "true" or permanent form. May overlap with Bishōnen Line. See Forced Transformation. Contrast Attractive Bent Species for when this happens to a human transformed into a non-human. This would also be a Sub-Trope of Humanity Ensues. Overlaps with A Form You Are Comfortable With and Shapeshifting Seducer.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ayakashi Triangle: Une is a living hand mirror in the present, but when she was more powerful in the past, she looked like a beautiful human woman. She was even dressed like the oiran from the Red Light District she was formed in.
• Bleach:
  • Yoruichi Shihoin is introduced in the form of a black cat, which in the anime has a man's voice. It turns out she is a beautiful, dark-skinned woman in human form. She enjoys teasing Ichigo, who gets flustered when he sees her naked.
  • Hyourinmaru, the spirit of Toshiro's sword, is normally an ice dragon◊, but later appears as an extremely handsome man◊ that the female spirits go absolutely crazy over.
• Dance in the Vampire Bund: Mina Tepes normally wears the form of a preteen girl. Her true form, which she initially only uses in battle, is a tall, naked, full-figured woman with waist-length blonde hair. After seeing it for the first time, Yuki later tells Mina that movie stars would be jealous of her true form. Mina intentionally keeps this form secret to keep the three vampire clan lords from forcing her to marry one of them (they've been waiting a century for the Undead Child to become pubescent so she can birth them pureblooded heirs).
• Dragon Half: Mink's father was a knight sent to kill a dragon. Instead he ended up falling for her when he saw her human form and married her.
• The Elder Sister-like One: Chiyo and Haru are both Lovecraftian Eldritch Abominations, with Chiyo specifically being Shub-Niggurath and Haru being something akin to a Hound of Tindalos. Both of them can take on the forms of human women, with Chiyo becoming stunningly beautiful and voluptuous with long, dark hair and Haru becoming an attractive but more petite-figured blonde. Chiyo has made a pact with Yuu in which she takes on the role of his big sister, but it's clear that she is enamored with him to some degree, and he finds her breathtakingly beautiful and has to struggle at times to keep seeing her as just his "big sis". Haru, in the meantime, seems to have a similar connection to Yuu's uncle Ryou, having taken the form of his deceased cousin (Yuu's mother).
• The Four Knights of the Apocalypse character Lancelot is part fairy (meaning that he can shapeshift into an animal) and part human, with delicate, almost-feminine features and a muscular build that combines the best of both species. When he needs to travel incognito, he changes into a very ordinary (albeit pink-furred) fox- a form that arguably suits his personality more than the one he was born in. His companions are shocked when he changes back, and the rate of unwanted attention he gets goes up considerably.
• Protagonists Saria and Lulune (or Salia and Rurune) in The Fruit of Evolution are a Kaiser Kong and an unnaturally badass donkey respectively in their original forms, but transform into stunningly beautiful human women after eating the titular Power-Up Food. Lulune rarely changes back to her original donkey form, but Saria casually flips from human to gorilla and back for comedy all the time.
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: All of the major dragons seen are Cute Monster Girls (or a Captain Ersatz of Sebastian in Fafnir's case) in their human forms. It's noted during the Hot Springs Episode that this is not a racial trait, but rather a result of the transformation spell translating standards of beauty across species lines (i.e. a dragon that is attractive by dragon standards will become a human that is attractive by human standards).

• Pokémon Heroes: Latias is initially disguised as a human girl. While the target demographic means she's more of a cutie than a hottie, Ash certainly seems to like her.
• Soul Eater: Blair is a magical cat who can transform into a voluptuous woman. Her human form has been acknowledged as attractive in-universe.
• Female protagonists Tomoe and Mio in TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy- are a dragon and a Giant Spider in their true forms, respectively, but spend much of their time in the bodies of beautiful human girls. It's even noted that Makoto, the male protagonist and their love interest, is hesitant to actually bed them because he knows what they really look like — although he does ultimately surrender to their feelings.
• A recurring trope in the Pretty Cure franchise, where most fairies have the capabilities of turning into humans of varying attractiveness. Special shout-outs go to Coco, Nuts, Coupe-sama, Julio/Pikario, and Hariham Harry.

Comic Books

• Futurama/Simpsons Infinitely Secret Crossover Crisis: The crustacean alien Zoidberg gets dropped into a vat of nuclear waste. He emerges as a fully nude human with blond hair. Needless to say, the nearby human women are drooling at him, which Zoidberg misinterprets to be a disgusted reaction, causing him to conclude that he had turned into something hideous.
• X-Men: Mystique often takes the form of a human to allure men, as her true, blue-skinned form is often met with fear or disgust by them.

Fairy Tales

• The Frog Prince: The story revolves around a princess who shares her home and bed with a frog in return for helping her retrieve her golden ball. This breaks the curse on the frog and reverts him back to his human form, which the princess immediately falls for. They get married afterwards.
• There is a South American fairy tale about a piranha that turns into a human woman and becomes So Beautiful, It's a Curse. Luckily for her, her teeth remain the same, so any guy who wants a Forceful Kiss will be told off sharply.

Fan Works

• The Bridge: When Equestrians and Kaiju enter the Equestria Girls world, the human forms a few of them wind up very attractive. Adagio and Mothra Lea both become tall and shapely while Godzilla, while rough-looking and scarred, does get a tough and muscular physique. Subverted with Princess Celestia, who should have become an attractive older woman, but instead became a short teenager due to outside interference. Downplayed with Irys: she sports odd traits such as Cute Little Fangs and albinism, but is generally considered to be pretty, and also notably gets a What Beautiful Eyes! reaction from Sunset Shimmer. Averted with others however, Monster X is remarked as looking decidedly average and with Megalon as portly.
• Ponyfall: Pretty much everybody finds the Equestrian's human forms to be beautiful, especially Celestia's human form which has very huge knockers. It's even more awkward since they are found naked.
• "Super Crown" by ayyk92: Bowser uses the Super Crown to transform himself into a human female with a remarkable resemblance to Princess Peach, but still retaining some of his distinctive features, like horns and a spiky shell. In the final panel, Mario is apparently dating the transformed Bowser, much to Peach and Luigi's confusion.
• The Ultimate Evil: In this Jackie Chan Adventures fanfiction, a couple of the Demon Sorcerers seem to make a habit of giving their human disguises an allure to certain humans:
  • Hsi Wu aims to invoke this trope In-Universe against Jade Chan when designing his human disguise. He gives his Seymour disguise brown eyes which he knows from experience "mortal females ha[ve] a certain weakness for" to make it more approachable to Jade.
  • When Shendu dons a human disguise in The Stronger Evil, he makes himself a 6'9'' half-Asian man with a roman nose who largely looks like an attractive humanization of Shendu's true form.
• A short story based on Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar. A Herald and his Companion (an angel in the form of an idealized flawlessly perfect horse, a mare in this instance) meet up with a well-meaning but somewhat senile wizard, who proceeds to "restore" the Companion to its "true form": an angelically, superhumanly beautiful woman. This complicates not only their personal relationship but a delicate diplomatic mission as well.
• Kyril Sutherland from The Night Unfurls. Tall, Dark, and Handsome in human form. His true form, on the other hand...
• The Heart Trilogy: Smaug eventually gains a seven feet tall human form that has dark hair, a warrior's physique and a face based upon Benedict Cumberbatch. However, it's downplayed by the narration acknowledging that Smaug would be considered handsome if not for the cruel lines around his mouth.

Films — Animation

• Beowulf (2007): While we never get a clear look at Grendel's mother in her true form, she appears to be a monstrous golden serpent with limbs. In human form, she appears as a nubile young woman wearing only a constantly-shifting gold liquid who is able to seduce both Beowulf and Hrothgar.
• The Last Unicorn: The unicorn takes on human form due to an Emergency Transformation. The result? Lady Amalthea, who Prince Lir falls desperately in love with.
• In Shrek 2, Shrek takes a magic potion that transforms him into a human. The maids who revive him after he passes out find him very attractive (as pictured above) and are disappointed to learn that he already has a wife. It is justified since one of the "Happily Ever After" Potion's effects is to beautify the drinker. When Donkey drinks it, he becomes a magnificent white stallion.
• The Swan Princess: Jean-Bob is a frog who thinks he fits the trope. When he finally gets Odette to kiss him, he believes he has transformed into a dashing prince. As some lady freaks out and faints at the sight of a frog in the ballroom, he notes to himself how women "fall for him".

Films — Live-Action

• The Faculty: The leader of the aliens turns out to be Marybeth, who, while presented as a cute Girl Next Door before The Reveal, gets her Beautiful All Along moment afterwards when she confronts Zeke and Casey. She even asks Zeke if he likes what he sees when he points out that she's completely naked (her clothes didn't survive when she shapeshifted into her alien form and then back to human).
• Galaxy Quest: The film features a group of octopus/squid-like aliens who can disguise themselves as humans. Fred Kwan, one of the male human characters, is madly attracted to Laliari, one of the female aliens. He is fine with her true form as well, as he isn't turned off when she seems to revert to her true form while they're making out.When Fred returns home with the rest of the crew, Laliari goes with him and becomes a member of the cast for the Galaxy Quest revival as her disguised form under the name JaneDoe.
• Halloweentown High: Dylan has an attraction to a girl from Halloweentown. When he sees her real form is a furry pink troll, he's initially repulsed, making it clear that he was way more attracted to her human disguise. This is also inverted, as she admits to finding humans ugly and claims that in her world, her normal form is considered very attractive.
• Men in Black II has the villainous Serleena who's true Kylothian form is a mass of plant-vine like tentacles but who shapeshifts into the form a lingerie model (played by Lara Flynn Boyle) she sees in a magazine for most of the movie.
• Stepsister from Planet Weird Ariel finds her human form grotesque compared to her true form as an alien bubble from the planet Zircolon. However everyone else at school (other than her dismissive stepsister Megan) recognises that she's beautiful by human standards.

Literature

• Animorphs: A Running Gag in the series is that everyone finds Ax's human form attractive.
• The Belgariad: Belgarath is traveling in the form of a wolf when he meets a wolf who considers him to be Attractive Bent Species. Deciding that a litter of puppies might be embarrassing, he resists her advances. She follows him home and spends the next thousand years as his companion, until the day she reveals that she's learned sorcery by watching him and takes the drastic step of taking human form to get his attention. And that's how he met his wife Poledra.
• Discworld: Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo is normally mangy and ugly looking. When transformed into a human in Witches Abroad and Maskerade, he is described as being very attractive to anyone who doesn't know who he is. Even Granny Weatherwax goes a little pink when she sees him as a human for the first time.
• The Dresden Files: In Fool Moon, Tera West is described as being a very attractive werewolf woman. She's actually a wolf who turns human, not the other way around.
• The Last Unicorn: The eponymous creature is unintentionally turned into a young human woman in order to hide her from the wicked King Haggard. As "Lady Amalthea," she is unspeakably beautiful, with a willowy figure, long platinum-blonde hair, and huge dark eyes. Everyone who sees her is captivated.
• The Year of Rogue Dragons: Karasendrieth the song dragon is indeed beautiful when she shapeshifts to human form. In book two, she starts a relationship with the human Dorn.

Live-Action TV

• Angel: When Connor sees Illyria in human form, he comments that she is hot.
  Angel: They were so supposed to fix that.
• Bewitched: "A Bunny for Tabitha" has Uncle Arthur accidentally transform a rabbit into a beautiful woman whom Darren's client falls for.
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: Played with in regards to Trakeena. She is already human-looking, but when she disguises herself as a regular human woman in the episode "Stolen Beauty", she's so gorgeous that everyone is struck dumb just looking at her, including the male Rangers. A later episode has Leo and Damon admit that they find Trakeena attractive even in her regular form.
  • Power Rangers Time Force: In "Lovestruck Rangers", the mutant criminal Contemptra takes on the form of a beautiful girl named Angelique to place the male Rangers under a love spell. After her defeat, Wes openly admits that she was a "babe" in human form.
  • Power Rangers Mystic Force: When Necrolai sacrifices her magic to resurrect Leanbow and Daggeron, she changes from a bat-like creature to a human woman. Both Xander and Vida agree that she is much hotter in this form.
• Star Trek:
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Man Trap" has the "salt vampire" of planet M-113, which really looks like a sort of yeti-like, green, sucker-faced creature. However, it lures its victims to their deaths by being perceived as the most attractive person they can think of, so more most of the male Enterprise crew this is as a lovely young woman. For Doctor McCoy, it looks like Nancy Crater — a woman he dated 12 years prior, seemingly unaged — and for Kirk as Nancy as the age he expected her to be — an attractive older woman. Uhura sees it as an attractive male crewmate, and others see it as a crewmate it killed so it could sneak aboard the Enterprise.
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Dauphin" has the much more friendly Salia the Allasomorph, who is revealed to be a shapechanger who has taken the form of a teenage girl who Wesley falls in love with. Her aide Anya is less friendly and mostly appears as a stoic older woman. Allasomorph's true form is a pearly, somewhat gel-like, amorphous energy being — very beautiful to look at astatically but not really humanoid, Wesley is amazed by her true form and very much implied to still love her that way.

Myths & Religion

• Kitsune, huli jing, and kumiho fox spirits are notorious in East Asian mythology for taking on human forms (usually that of women) which are exceptionally beautiful, and using those forms to seduce humans. The one caveat was that their illusions were imperfect, and commonly linked to their age and number of tails. Higher level fox spirits were almost impossible to spot without training or keen instincts, but lower-level ones almost always slipped up at hiding their fox-like characteristics.
• Selkies and Wereseals are fairies that transform into beautiful humans on land by shedding their seal skins. A number of stories have human men falling for and even marrying female selkies and wereseals. Male selkies marry human women occasionally as well, but they're just as often simple babydaddies, often at the human's request.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: All dragons can shapeshift into humanoid forms and back at will, retaining their original mental and social stats. Said stats include Charisma, which is a measure of both forcefulness of personality and personal attractiveness in D&D, and particularly for the so-called "metallic dragons" (Gold Dragons chief among them), this stat reaches truly superhuman values, making their humanoid forms incredibly appealing to mere mortals.

Video Games

• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Shinigami initially appears looking like a cartoony ghost, then occasionally has a Transformation Sequence to turn into an attractive young human girl that Desuhiko considers "top-tier" and tries to ask her out, receiving an appropriate response in the form of Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs.
• Persona:
  • Persona 4: Teddie gains a human body after working out a lot. The characters are flabbergasted and the girls a little uncomfortable. He's still Teddie, though, so few women give him the time of day.
  • Persona 5 Royal: Morgana (who typically looks like a cat) gains a human form which the protagonist internally refers to him as "handsome guy" before realizing who he is.
• Quest for Glory III: The Simbani tribe are on the edge of war with a clan of Skinchangers called the Leopardmen who spend most of their time in the shape of leopards. When one of the Leopardmen is caught snooping around the Simbani village, it looks like an ordinary leopard, albeit one that can stand on two legs if it wants to... until The Hero hits it with a dispel potion, bringing it back to human form, which is a very attractive woman named Johari who soon has half the tribe lusting after her, including the chief's son.
• Sengoku Ace: One of the new characters in Sengoku Blade is the Samurai Robot Buddy called "Hagane" (or "Katana"), who has the personal mission of finding its human body from the Big Bad. When it finally recovers their endings (solo or team), it happens to be a woman's body, which get the attention of all men of the group... and also Junis.
• World of Warcraft: Dragons are able to assume a humanoid form at will, and they are often very attractive in these forms, particularly when said form is a Blood Elf/High Elf. Examples include Alexstrasza, Nozdormu, Onyxia, and (as of BFA) Wrathion.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: This is a plot point during "Spring Broken". In order to win a bet with Verosika that the I.M.P. can kill more people than she and her succubi have sex with, they have Loona, a hellhound, use her human disguise to seduce targets and lure them away to be assassinated. The trouble is, the succubi also have incredibly attractive human forms and are easily able to seduce numerous humans.

Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive: At the end of the Painted Black arc, one of Grace's "brothers", who was otherwise only seen in his were-guinea-pig form, switches back to human, and is revealed to be surprisingly handsome. Ellen and an agent don't even pretend they're not Eating the Eye Candy.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 has Cheatsy Koopa invoke this trope when he transforms his sister Kootie Pie into "Mario's dream girl" in order to have her distract the heroes from their evil plan. He mostly succeeds, causing her to become an attractive blonde, but forgets to remove her tail. Despite Luigi and the princess both noticing it, their scheme works. Inverted later on when Mario returns the favour by stealing their wand and turning Luigi into Kassanova Koopa.
• American Dragon: Jake Long: Jasmine is considered the "most beautiful girl" at the school dance by many of the patrons there, they're a bit horrified when she transforms into a nix.
• Futurama: "Anthology Of Interest II" has a segment where Bender becomes human. There is an apparent mutual attraction between him and Amy apparently. (Professor Farnsworth also seems to find him attractive when Bender tries to see if kissing him works the same way it did with Amy).

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