Lip Losses

Behold: the only PG-rated image of this trope we could find!

Much like other protruding elements of the human face, lips are very sensitive features; they play a vital role - not just in eating or speaking, but in the accepted composition of the face itself. As such, though they don't receive much emphasis compared to other features like the eyes or the nose, lips are a very popular target when it comes to inflicting pain.

After all, as anyone who's accidentally taken a bite out of their own lip knows, they're alarmingly tender and can bleed quite heavily if pierced violently enough. More to the point, having the lips severed or torn means leaving the victim incoherent, unable to eat or drink normally, and disfigured in a way that will be obvious even from a distance. As such, it's not unsurprising that the removal of lips is one of the most distinctive forms of facial mutilations encountered in fiction and reality.

A Sub-Trope of Facial Horror and Attack the Mouth, attacks on the human lips can take many forms:

• Someone getting their lips pierced with a sharp object, possibly as part of their mouths being stitched shut.
• Someone biting into their lip by mistake - or in more instances, biting through their lip.
• Someone getting their lips bitten or chewed off.
• Someone having their lips severed with a blade.

Compare and contrast Glasgow Grin and Jawbreaker.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Kemono Jihen, a formless kemono becomes infatuated with a handsome man working at a shop, but due to lacking a body, she can't greet him. In an attempt to remedy this, she begins ripping the facial features off pretty young women, including tearing their lips right off their faces. The kemono doesn't stop until Aya uses her abilities to grant her a human outer appearance.
• Thorgil from Vinland Saga has several prominent scars (and many more usually hidden beneath his clothing), including a facial scar that runs diagonally through both his lips, leaving them permanently split. It adds onto the thuggish and menacing vibes that he gives off.

Comic Books

• Batman: In Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, the Great White Shark lost his lips to frostbite after being left for dead in a freezing cell. He later filed his teeth into points to complete his new Nightmare Face.
• Birds of Prey: In one story arc, a SWAT team goes after the assassin Cheshire. She lures one of the men into a false sense of security by kissing him... and then biting off his lower lip.
• Locke & Key: In "Keys To The Kingdom," Zack Wells is finally unmasked as Lucas "Dodge" Caravaggio, and during his efforts to evade capture, he pretends to overcome his possession and begs Ellie Whedon for a kiss; when Ellie obliges, Dodge responds by biting off her lower lip. For good measure, this scene is witnessed among Dodge's extracted thoughts in "Clockworks" set twenty years prior, indicating that this mutilation was something that Dodge had always secretly wanted to inflict.
• Wet Moon: When Natalie is attacked by a knife-wielding assailant, she gets a diagonal slash across her lips and up her cheek, leaving a scar she bears for the rest of the series.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) fanfiction, when Vivienne Graham is reborn in her and San's first hybridized form, her lips are partly shredded and gone at the sides in her new form; with ingrown, Ghidorah-like fangs in their place.
• During the final chapters of The Land of What Might-Have-Been, the Empress of Unbridled Radiance stars gnawing obsessively on her lower lip as she realizes that Elphaba is loose in her capital city, marking the beginning of a massive Villainous Breakdown. By the end of Chapter 73, she gets so enraged at Elphaba's antics that she ends up biting off her own lip, and doesn't realize it until she notices that everyone in the room is staring at her in horror. The Empress has the advantage of incredible regenerative powers, but that just results in her continuously biting open her own lip as her mood worsens, regenerating it every time.

Films — Live-Action

• Attack the Block: When the aliens dog-pile on Hi-Hatz, one of them bites his lips off before they start eating him.
• Downplayed in The Dark Knight. Behind-the-scenes images of Heath Ledger's facial prosthetics for the Joker show that his lower lip also has some extensive scarring, although in the film his makeup means these scars aren't very obvious.
• Dawn of the Dead (2004) kicks off with Ana and Luis waking up to find the newly-zombified Vivian inside their house, standing in the bedroom doorway. As soon as she steps into the light, it's revealed that the girl is now sporting a massive bite wound across her upper and lower lips.
• Hellboy (2004): One of Rasputin's lieutenants is the ex-Nazi Karl Ruprecht Kroenen, an obsessive masochist suffering from surgical addiction: on top of the many cybernetic modifications and acts of Self-Harm inflicted his own body, he's also revealed to have sliced off his upper and lower lip by the start of the film - hence why he never speaks and usually wears a gas mask to cover the injury.
• Kill Bill:
  • After awakening from her four-year-long coma in Vol. 1, the Bride discovers that Buck the orderly has been prostituting her unconscious body to paying customers. After Buck leaves the room for the sake of his client's privacy, she pretends to still be comatose while the latest john climbs on top of her, and as soon as he tries to kiss her, she chomps down hard on his lower lip - complete with a charming shot of the damn thing being stretched to breaking point!
  • In Vol. 2, Semi-retired pimp Esteban Vihaio remarks that Bill was unnecessarily harsh in shooting the Bride in the head, claiming that he would have just cut her face. Sounds pleasant by comparison, but then we see that one of his prostitutes is sporting a painful-looking gash running from her lower lip to the base of her nose. Equally unpleasant is the fact that the poor girl can't properly close her mouth as a result, forcing Vihaio to lend her a hankie to mop the saliva off her chin.
• In Kung Fu Hustle, Sing accidentally gets a cageful of snakes dumped over him. Bone suggests he whistle to calm them, only for Sing to get bitten squarely on the lips the moment he tries. For good measure, his lips end up swelling to the size of watermelons.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park: When Dieter Stark is attacked by a swarm of Compsognathus, one of them gnaws at his upper lip.
• Saw IV features a man waking up with his Mouth Stitched Shut and finding himself hooked up to a strangulation trap; after he's forced to kill a fellow captive to escape the trap, he screams - violently ripping the stitches out of his lips in the process.
• In Yellowbeard, the title character is at one point mentioned to often force people to eat their own lips.

Literature

• In the first book of the Deptford Mice series, one of the rats digging under Blackheath is a particularly massive specimen known only as "Smiler": apparently, he made the mistake of mouthing off to Morgan when he was younger, and was punished by having his lips sliced off. To this day, he's still easily recognizable by his perpetual grin and slurred speech.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Discussed in "The Meltdown" when Greg says he wouldn't want to lose his lips to frostbite because he would look like he was smiling at unfitting moments (listing a funeral as an example).
• Discworld:
  • In Mort, mention is made of a past king of Sto Lat who amused himself by cutting off his enemies' lips and legs, and then promising them their freedom if they ran through the city playing a trumpet.
  • In Interesting Times, Rincewind is being questioned by the deranged Emperor of the Agatean Empire. Whenever he tries to answer, a chamberlain shouts "Silence!", prompting Rincewind to ask the Emperor if he could make the chamberlain stop saying that. Unsurprisingly, this is how the Emperor fulfills the request.
• In Dracula, Lucy wildly gnashes her teeth when she gets staked, causing her fangs to tear up her lips.
• In Goldfinger, one of the title character's associates is Billy "The Grinner" Ring, a Chicago mobster with a "permanent smile" resulting from someone having cut off his lower lip.
• As The Gospel of Loki essentially recounts the canonical events of the eponymous trickster god's life, it naturally features the moment in which the dwarves he cheated take revenge upon him by sewing his lips shut. This is painful enough, but he later has to slowly tear the stitches out of his lips one by one, leaving him permanently scarred thanks to the dwarves' magical thread. For good measure, the fact that his fellow gods did nothing to help - and openly laughed at his misfortune - leaves him even more bitter than ever before, gradually paving the way for his later betrayal...
• In Red Dragon, animalistic Serial Killer Francis Dolarhyde bites the lips off Freddy Lounds using his "Tooth Fairy" dentures. It seems to be a symbolic punishment, given that Freddy is a sleazy tabloid writer who knowingly published insulting falsehoods about the Tooth Fairy; Dolarhyde is thus "silencing" him by mutilating his mouth. For good measure, he then sets him on fire and sends him tumbling downhill on a wheelchair, leaving him to die in hospital - but not before providing a barely-coherent witness statement.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • When introduced in A Clash of Kings, Ironborn captain Dagmer Cleftjaw sports a hideous scar across his mouth, courtesy of being smashed in the face with an axe; as such, he's described as having "four lips instead of two."
  • Jaime Lannister returns to Harrenhal in A Feast for Crows to find that his old captor Vargo Hoat has been subjected to this; having been tortured to death by Gregor "The Mountain That Rides" Clegane, the man's severed head is missing its lips, though it's not made clear if he was made to eat them along with his limbs or if he was simply mutilated post-mortem.

Live-Action TV

• Hannibal: The lip-biting incident from Red Dragon is replicated in "The Number of the Beast is 666", except with a different victim: this time, Francis Dolarhyde bites off the lips of Frederick Chilton, who was baited into slandering him in the press. Just like Lounds, Chilton is then set on fire... but in a departure from the novel, he survives - though he's naturally left barely coherent and in great pain.
• In The Snow Spider, the cursed broken horse figurine represents a horse whose lips had been cut off (along with its tail and eyelids) by a jealous Welsh prince, apparently because the horse was one of a herd that the king of Ireland wanted to give as an engagement gift to a woman whom the prince wanted for himself.
• Criminal Minds had a particularly disturbed Unsub in "Reflection of Desire" who does this to his first victim after killing her. You're better off not knowing what he needed them for.

Music

• Implied to have happened to the narrator's Hibachi dealer in the "Weird Al" Yankovic original song "Everything You Know Is Wrong", as the song states that the dealer "takes off his prosthetic lips" before informing the narrator that everything he knows is wrong.

Mythology

• Norse Mythology: After Loki bet his head against a dwarf and lost, the dwarf sewed his lips shut as punishment when Loki tried to Rules Lawyer the bet by claiming that he was only allowed to take Loki's head and not any portion of the neck. Loki was forced to tear the stitches out, mutilating his lips in the process.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: Zon-Kuthon, the god of pain, removed his own lips along with many other Malevolent Mutilations.

Video Games

• Condemned: Criminal Origins: As Ethan is investigating Carl "The Torturer" Anderson's latest crime, he finds a classroom where Carl cut Samuel Tibbits' lips off and left them on a chalkboard with "Loose Lips Sink Ships" written on it.
• The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games: One of the forms that Omfak can turn his head into is a giant pair of lips. These lips are his weak point. When you defeat him, the lips explode.
• Mewgenics: One type of Mook your feline team can come across is called the Glass Spitter. Where do you think their ammunition is stored?
• Chris Walker of Outlast began tearing bits of his own face off after being experimented on at Mount Massive, removing his nose and both his lips in the process. As a result, in the event that you didn't notice his gigantic frame, he can be easily distinguished by his skull-like face and slobberingly distorted voice.
• Skullgirls: Painwheel doesn't appear to have lips anymore, having had them removed as part of the experiment by Lab Zero to turn her into a living weapon.
• Vermintide II: Most of the Rotbloods, a barbarian horde who worship the Plague God Nurgle, have decayed or missing lips due to the diseases they carry. It's seen on everyone from the lowliest Mooks to their Chaos Lord.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends: In the TV episode "Party Animal", Flippy's lips swell up from an allergic reaction to venison, resulting in them being sliced off by the Iris Out.

Webcomics

• Unwinder's Tall Comics: Barbecue Sauce has an odd character design where he's constantly baring his teeth, no matter his facial expression. One flashback comic, "The Accident", explains that he burnt his lips off in a tragically preventable accident: he attempted to smoke a cigarette immediately after kissing Gasoline Lips Debbie. (Though the author's commentary below this page notes that it's probably not canon.)
• During the "Oceans Unmoving II" arc of Sluggy Freelance, pirate captain Donaly was interrogated/tortured by Sir John Jacobs's men. Unfortunately for both parties, the new interrogation knives were "amazingly sharp" and Donaly's lips were accidentally cut off, so they couldn't stop him from screaming. They managed to calm him down long enough to give them information, but he had trouble with "m", "b", and "p" sounds.

Western Animation

• Aaahh!!! Real Monsters: The episode "The Lips Have It" has Oblina losing her lips, which are then stolen by an aspiring model.
• In the Family Guy episode "Dearly Deported", when Lois agrees with Brian's notion that Chris's new girlfriend is hot, she does a playful lip bite. Peter tried to do the same, but bit part of his lower lip off, exposing his teeth.
• In the very last episode of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Shadow Weaver's face is exposed for the first time just before she sacrifices her life to help defeat Horde Prime. It's long been implied that Shadow Weaver's face has been hideously disfigured ever since her Face–Heel Turn in her Backstory, when she attempted to summon a powerful, evil monster and the spell went wrong. While the deformity isn't quite as bad as it has been implied, it does include massive scarring and discoloration on part of her face, and a small region of her lips that have been ripped off, exposing the teeth below◊.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Karate Island", one of the villains Sandy faces in Master Udon's temple is Lip Service, who attacks with her giant lips. Sandy defeats her by using a blowdryer to chap them to the point where they crumble and fall right off her face (!).
• VeggieTales: Discussed in the silly song "I Love My Lips", where Larry was discussing with Archibald about such scenarios where he would lose his lips, but only discusses comedic scenarios involving this.

Real Life

• Notorious pirate captain Edward Low once attempted to capture a Portuguese ship, only for the ship's captain to dump some valuable cargo rather than allow it to be seized by Low; enraged, Low cut off the captain's lips, before broiling them and forcing the captain to eat them.

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