Basic Trope: Female characters in movies seem to avoid being physically disfigured or even getting dirtied up despite the circumstances.
- Straight: Bob, Alice and Charlie escape from a burning building. Bob's face is badly burned, Charlie has several deep cuts but Alice only has a little bit of soot on her clothes.
- Exaggerated: Alice and Bob's building blows up. Bob receives third degree burns, several broken bones and scarring injuries while Alice hasn't been harmed at all. In fact, her hair is still perfect.
- Downplayed:
- Bob and Charlie don't suffer much damage either, so that Alice doesn't stand out.
- Alice has tattered clothes and a few burns, but is still in better condition than Bob and Charlie.
- Justified:
- Although Alice is in the middle of a battle, she sits on the sidelines and acts as The Medic.
- Alternatively, the other male characters try to protect her from anything dangerous.
- Alice is a total Action Girl and her skills are so great that nothing can touch her.
- Alice has Nigh-Invulnerability or is otherwise immune to the nasty side effects of combat.
- Alice is a robot with liquid metal technology.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob have to crawl through a thicket of thorns. Alice emerges with a lot of scratches while all Bob has is his hair slightly messed up.
- Alice is more damaged than she should logically be after a battle.
- Subverted: Alice, Bob and Charlie escape a burning building. Bob and Charlie are both badly burned, but Alice seems fine... until she suddenly takes a bad fall and is severely injured.
- Double Subverted: It skips forward to a couple of days later where Bob and Charlie still haven't recovered from their injuries but Alice looks perfectly fine.
- Parodied: Bob and Alice compete in an obstacle course that involves mud pits, sharp objects, hungry dogs and water hoses. Bob emerges muddy and bloodied with his clothes in tatters while Alice emerges looking like she just came from a spa. She then checks herself in a compact and declares "not a hair out of place".
- Zig-Zagged: Alice's house catches fire, she cuts herself on broken glass but is unharmed when the ceiling crashes down around her. She hits her head on a door frame but doesn't have the resulting bruise. She emerges from the building with the cuts and covered in soot but without a single burn. Later on in the ER she has the cut bandaged up and looks perfectly fine.
- Averted: Alice and the boys emerge from some disaster with all the same injuries.
- Enforced:
- The creators don't want to be seen as misogynists so Alice never gets any real harm done to her.
- Alice is played by an attractive actress, and the people involved don't want her to be shown getting dirty.
- Lampshaded:
- "You've just been through a forest fire so why the hell do you look like you came from the beauty parlour?"
- "Alice, trying to hide your scar by wearing all that makeup/that turtleneck even in 80-degree weather only calls attention to the damn thing. Take it off."
- Invoked: Alice goes into a house fire, stating that she'll only get dirty and the guys think that's sexy anyway.
- Exploited:
- Bob is a Stalker with a Crush so when the building catches fire, he throws himself on her so that "her beauty will never fade."
- Alice has a large scar on her abdomen that she uses to garner sympathy from folks, telling everyone it is from a C-section she had after being raped and becoming pregnant while very young, but it's actually from a routine medical procedure.
- Defied: The man who started the fire is still there, and lights Alice specifically on fire to make a statement.
- Discussed: "I'm a girl; I'm not gonna get too beaten up if I go into that burning building"
- Conversed: "I love Alice from Fire Fighters NY and how she never even messes her hair up in those fires."
- Deconstructed:
- Alice is part of a zombie apocalypse and is able to get through attacks without any scratches...because she runs off while the others do all the fighting and hides until the zombies go away. The Hero takes her aside and says something to the effect of "In this world now, you have two choices: stay alive and be ugly or die and be pretty".
- Alternatively: Her lack of scratches leads people to believe that she’s perfectly okay but she’s not. Alice is badly injured but the way she looks doesn’t say so.
- Reconstructed: Alice becomes a capable Action Girl and learns to protect herself properly from getting badly damaged in battle.
- Played For Laughs: Alice, Bob and Charlie are on a game show to be gunged. Bob and Charlie get gunged normally but Alice's gunger malfunctions and sprays Bob and Charlie instead, leaving Alice looking fine. She bows to the crowd and the presenter remarks about how chivalrous the gunger is.
- Played For Drama:
- A man breaks into Alice's house one night and cuts her face up with a piece of broken glass, leaving her horribly disfigured. Alice refuses to leave the house again because of how bad her scars are.
- A group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic Crapsack World find Alice who claims to be alone for a long time. The group immediately realizes she's lying and suspect her as a threat because her long hair is far too neat, clean, and lacking in split ends for her to have been alone for a long time.
- Intended Audience Reaction: This is foreshadowing of Alice's true nature as a daughter of the love goddess.
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