When it comes to beauty, fiction sometimes treats what's attractive and what's hideous as objective facts, with everyone in the story having the same standards of beauty. However, in Real Life, what's considered attractive varies wildly, from culture to culture, and individual to individual. Some works of fiction show this by having individuals and cultures whose beauty standards differ from those of others.
When it comes to individuals, this trope often manifests as a quirk that someone has to contrast them with everyone else. In a world where the Buxom Beauty Standard is the norm, some guys might prefer women with small breasts or flat chests, and sometimes even consider large breasts ugly or hideous. A man considered a Chick Magnet because of his looks might have some girls who think his features are a turnoff, while a woman generally considered ugly might have some people who consider her ugly features hot. If someone uses their looks to manipulate people, they might sometimes fail because someone doesn't think they are attractive.
When it comes to different cultures, people who interact with them might experience culture shock because of different beauty standards. Someone considered beautiful or ugly back home might discover that in other places, the majority populations have the opposite opinion. While in some cultures being a Chubby Chaser is a niche thing, in others it is the mainstream view. One way this trope can be used is for someone considered ugly by their own culture to be considered beautiful by those outside of it.
This trope is prominent in works featuring nonhuman and human characters. Some nonhumans might believe that Humans Are Ugly because of different beauty standards. If a member of a nonhuman race conforms to human standards of beauty, the humans might find them hot, while the nonhumans think they are hideous. If a nonhuman finds humans attractive, other nonhumans will likely consider them a weirdo. This can lead to Complimenting the Transformed if a character is changed from one species the observer thinks ugly to another the observer thinks is attractive.
See also Our Nudity Is Different and Incest Standards Are Relative for other culturally dependent beliefs and Ugly Cute, for when something viewed as ugly is seen as cute. Can be a justification for someone believing that I Am Not Pretty. Overlaps with Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad if a person or group has inverted standards of conventional beauty. Overlaps with Deliberate Values Dissonance if this is shown with an entire culture. Can overlap with Ignore the Fanservice and/or You're Not My Type if the reason for the rejection is due to differing ideas of beauty. Related to Has a Type, which is about people having different standards in relationships.
Contrast Sliding Scale of Beauty, where beauty standards are treated as objective to the point of being able to be measured.
Not to be confused with Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder, although the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is a commonly related phrase.
Because this is too common, No Real Life Examples, Please!.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You: Some of Rentarou's girlfriends tend to be less than happy about their appearance (e.g. Karane wanting a bigger chest, Meme wanting a smaller chest, Hahari thinking she's too old to date him) but Rentarou always makes it clear that he loves all his girlfriends the way they are.
- Apocalypse Zero: Hamuko, a hideous monster, considers all human women to be ugly, though she finds human men attractive and if she sees a man that she wants with a pretty woman, she will proceed to Murder the Hypotenuse.
- Delicious in Dungeon: Played for laughs in a Monster Tidbits omake, where the orc chief Zon comments to the human Laios that his wives must seem pretty ugly to him, being stout Pig Men like himself. Laios replies that no, they have plenty of attractive features: straight noses, big eyes, good teeth, soft lips, large bosoms, beautiful behinds... realizing too late that Zon doesn't like having his wives ogled in such detail, at which point he switches hastily to talking about how much he loves elves and their pointy ears.
- Dragon Ball:
- In the original series, Master Roshi offers to train Son Goku only if Goku brings him a pretty girl. Goku brings over a fat woman, causing Roshi to show him a picture of two women: a conventionally pretty one, and a fat one. When asked which one is pretty, Goku responds that they both look pretty, causing Roshi to snark that Goku is a saint.
- In the manga version of Dragon Ball Super, Ribrianne's disgust towards Android #18 and Krillin is the polar opposite of the anime — here, she considers Krillin, who is short, bald and has no nose, to be incredibly handsome and can't believe he is married to #18, who is a conventional beauty.
- Fairy Tail:
- Everlue is a man who prefers blondes, but other than that his standards of beauty are basically the inverse of what most people's; his maids are all deformed looking and he considers the conventionally attractive Lucy to be hideous.
- Invoked by the Celestial Spirit Virgo, who uses Transformation Magic to change her appearance to suite her master's tastes. When she's owned by Everlue, she takes the form of a large maid who the main characters compare to a "gorilla", and when Lucy becomes her new master, her preferred form is that of a young, conventionally beautiful maid.
- Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA: Shirou unsuccessfully invokes this when trying to calm down Sella from a bout of A-Cup Angst. All he can come up with is "Everyone has different tastes," which she essentially takes to mean "Well, I'm sure someone finds you attractive," and causes her to fly off the handle.
- In Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, it's mentioned that the spell dragons use to take on human forms directly shifts them into whatever the relative standard of beauty would be (i.e. a dragon that is attractive by dragon standards will become a human that is equally attractive by human standards).
- Naruto: One filler episode features Ino acting as a Body Double for a princess who became fat from stress-eating due to her upcoming Arranged Marriage. When the ruse is discovered, the princess' fiance turns out to be a Chubby Chaser who ignores the slender Ino for the princess. Ino is baffled by this, as she thinks all guys only want skinny women, while Naruto clearly understands that some guys have different preferences.
- The h-manga Orc Musume wa Ikemen ga Osuki is about an ugly human knight who was bullied for becoming a Chick Magnet among orc women to the point that they all want to sleep with him. At first he's confused as to why they think an ugly guy like him is attractive, only to realize that from the orcs' point of view, he looks handsome, which he takes advantage of to make his own harem.
- Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time: Orcs in this setting mainly look like anthropomorphic pigs who believe that Humans Are Ugly. Piglette Pancetta is bullied for being deformed among other orcs because she resembles a beautiful human woman whose only orc traits are her ears, to the point where she even sees herself as ugly. She fell in love with Peter because he assured her she was pretty.
- Pokémon the Series: In "Battling a Cute Drama!", Marilyn is a girl with highly specific opinions of what makes a cute Pokémon. To her, a Pokémon can only be cute if it's less than two feet tall and is unevolved, and she even thinks Piplup and Mime Jr. are not cute, even though they fit her standards and would be considered adorable by most Trainers. It turns out she does this because she was made fun of for believing that Shellder, who looks like a clam with eyes and a long tongue, is the cutest Pokémon ever. She decided to hide her preferences by using more conventionally cute Pokémon, but Brock convinces her to embrace her preferences rather than trying to conform to others' expectations.
- Uncle from Another World: Played for Laughs. The inhabitants of the world that Yosuke was sent to have such a high standard of beauty that a completely average-looking Japanese man like himself is constantly being mistaken for an orc. When he saves a mother and her child from doom, the mother willingly offers to become "the orc's" bride as a bargain to let her son escape.
- With the Light: Hikaru, after becoming a teenager, doesn't really look at women in magazines like other boys his age. He enjoys grabbing and touching the hair of long-haired girls and women, and is uninterested in short-haired women regardless of their looks. While guys liking long hair isn't an uncommon trait, Hikaru only seems to be attracted to women's hair and not other parts of their body.
Comic Books
- Beauty: A key concept in the comic trilogy: the main character is blessed with being the most beautiful person in the world to whoever is looking at her. In an extra comic, an ambassador from very far away begs to see her, and is only granted the right to take a painting of her home, where she is immediately described as plain by locals with beauty standards very different from the painter's.
- Marvel Apes: In the miniseries, the D-list supervillain, The Gibbon (who's basically a talking, human-sized gibbon), and a human woman named Fiona Fitzhugh end up on an alternate version of Earth where everyone is a talking, humanoid monkey or ape (Spider-Man is a spider money, Captain America is a gorilla, and so on). On this world, he is considered very handsome, though Fiona is considered hideous.
Fan Works
- In the Naruto and Mortal Kombat crossover Uzumaki Kombat
Milenna, who has feelings for Kimimaro, is worried that he will think she's ugly due to her being that of a conventionally attractive human's except for her face which is that of a Tarkatan's. When Kimimaro does see her face, rather than being disgusted, he says her face has its own form of beauty.
Films — Animation
- 101 Dalmatians: Pongo, a dalmatian canine, admits that dogs are poor judges on human beauty when he was looking for a potential mate for his "pet", Rodger Radcliffe. However, Pongo believed he had a "rough idea". When simply gazing outside, he notices some ladies and their dogs walking by and does make some accurate judgements. He naturally becomes completely smitten when first gazing upon Perdita, a female dalmatian, and as before, he accurately judges Anita, Perdita's "pet", as very lovely, too.
- Coco: Chicharrón's favorite song is "Everyone Knows Juanita," a song about an odd-looking woman with tangled hair, differently colored eyes, long arms, sticking-out teeth and a dented chin. The last lines of the song are "Her hair is like a briar, she stands in a bowlegged stance / And if I weren't so ugly, she'd possibly give me a chance."
- Monsters, Inc.: The monsters of Monstropolis seem to consider strange-looking monsters beautiful, the stranger the better. Roz reads a newspaper with the headline "Baby born with five heads, parents thrilled" in her introductory scene.
- Shrek: Fiona, who was born human and cursed to transform into an ogre at night, was afraid that Shrek would reject her ogre form as ugly, as humans do. It never occurred to her that an ogre would have different beauty standards, and when he sees her, he thinks she's beautiful.
- Spirited Away: Chihiro, a normal human girl, becomes trapped in the spirit realm after her parents accidentally eat food intended for the gods. While at worst, she's just plain and scrawny, the denizens of the spirit realm all treat her like she's hideous. Many of these spirits are either anthropomorphic beasts or masked ghosts.
- Thumbelina (1994): Thumbelina is considered beautiful by various characters. However, when she joins the Beetle Ball and is revealed not to be a bug, she is called ugly by the bugs attending it, which lowers her self-esteem.
Films — Live-Action
- The Gods Must Be Crazy: Kalahari bushman !Xi's first encounter with a white human has the narrator explain that he considers the woman, conventionally-attractive main character Kate, to be the most hideous creature he'd ever laid eyes on, finding her light skin to look disturbingly pale and sickly, likening her long, styled blonde hair to a mass of cobwebs, and seeing her as abnormally tall and outsized to where one would have to spend a whole day foraging to feed her. !Xi concludes that Kate must be one of his gods on account of her [to him] unique and frightful appearance, and implores her to take back her "evil thing" he'd been tasked with disposing of (a Coca-Cola bottle), much to her understandable confusion.
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Mantis is a conventionally pretty alien woman, if a little odd-looking due to her antennae and black eyes. Drax thinks she is absolutely hideous, and comments that he likes a woman with "some meat on her bones."
- Halloweentown High: Throughout the film, Dylan starts to develop a crush on Natalie, a hairy, pink troll girl who wears a human disguise for much of the movie. He finds her attractive when she's in human form, but is turned off when she takes the disguise off. In return, Natalie tells him that she thinks humans are ugly and that, where she comes from, she's actually considered beautiful. She's disappointed in Dylan's negative reaction, thinking of him as shallow after she'd been willing to date him despite his looks. In the end, they decide they're Better as Friends.
- Star Trek: Generations: "Human females are so repulsive!" Said by a pair of female Klingons, Lursa and B'Etor, while looking at Dr. Crusher through a bug inserted into Geordi's VISOR.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Implied when Betty Boop as a fellow toon considers Jessica to be lucky to be together with Roger, while Eddie (and presumably most of the human audience) would see it the other way around.
- Wicked: For Good: The handsome Fiyero gets together with Elphaba, who had always been considered a freak for her green skin. Fiyero tells her she’s beautiful, she tells him he doesn’t need to lie to her, and he replies "It’s not lying. It’s looking at things another way." In the end, when they reunite after Fiyero has been turned into the Scarecrow, Elphaba says the same things to him.
Folklore
- Very little historical information is known about Chinese strategist Zhuge Liang's wife Huang, but a popular depiction of her in folktales is giving her yellow hair and dark skin. To the Chinese people who prized the Raven Hair, Ivory Skin template, it made her frightfully ugly to the point her father actually apologized to Zhuge Liang on the eve of the wedding for his daughter's looks. Since the strategist actually asked for Lady Huang's hand in marriage upon hearing she was a Gadgeteer Genius and well-versed in astronomy, strategy and geography, the first thing Zhuge Liang did after lifting her veil was to exclaim: "Your father does not understand your beauty".
Literature
- Duckling Ugly: Cara has always been an outcast in her hometown for being ugly. When she becomes beautiful through the magic fountain of De Leon, she decides to go back to curse Madison, her biggest bully, into becoming ugly. The curse spreads throughout the whole town, turning everyone ugly and everything rotten and vile. Cara is now the only conventionally beautiful person and becomes an outcast again because "ugly is the new pretty."
- Earth's Children: Ayla was raised by Neanderthals and, lacking their rugged features, is considered ugly by their standards. She even starts to think of herself as unattractive and, though she is later told she is beautiful in the eyes of her fellow Cro-magnons, she still has trouble seeing herself as anything but "a big ugly woman." Also, unlike most Cro-Magnons, she sees Neanderthals as attractive because she grew up among them and became accustomed to their looks.
- Falling Up (Silverstein): The poem "In the Land of..." mentions Muglywugly, a place where you are considered movie-star attractive if you're really ugly.
- Fungus the Bogeyman: The horns on Bogeys' heads are considered attractive by the men, but ugly by the women. As such, the men shave their heads, but the women don't so as to cover their horns.
- Millions of Cats: The elderly couple has millions of cats follow them home, but all the cats look beautiful and they can't decide which cat to keep, so they ask which one is the most beautiful. The cats start fighting among themselves and devour each other until there's only one tiny, homely, scrawny little kitten left, who hid because it did not think it was beautiful. The couple decides to keep it, feeds it milk and give it a nice bath, and it grows up into a beautiful, sleek cat.
"It is the most beautiful cat in the whole world," said the very old man. "I ought to know, for I've seen—hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats—and not one was as pretty as this one."
- One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes: A woman has three daughters, One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes. Two-Eyes is considered ugly by her family because she only has two eyes like a regular person, but is considered pretty enough by most other people that a handsome knight falls in love with and marries her.
- Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: As seen in The Cutest Harpy On The Cliffs, harpies have Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad, a.k.a inverted, standards of beauty.
- The Queen of Water: Virginia is taken from her poor indigena village of Yana Urku to work as a maid for a family living in the mestizo town of Kunu Yaku. She thinks about how plump women were considered beautiful in Yana Urku because it meant they had enough money to live comfortably, and a thin girl was considered "as sickly and ugly as a dying tree." In Kunu Yaku, where the mestizos are better off, thin is beautiful instead, and the Doctorita is considered ugly because she is fat.
- The Stainless Steel Rat: Played for Laughs in The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You!, in which humanity is attacked by an alliance of aliens. The aliens are all wildly different physically, with various arrangements of tentacles, claws, eyestalks, slime, and lots and lots of teeth. They are nonetheless all united in regarding humans as hideous "dry-stick-pink-black aliens" (while finding each other very attractive, even across species lines). It turns out the poor aliens were being psychologically manipulated by a group of renegade humans bent on galactic domination; in the end, it is possible to convince the aliens that humans have "damp eyes and nasty-looking wet red things in their mouths" and that we aren't really all that hideous.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica (1978): In the novelization of the pilot, Lotay, the queen of the insectoid Ovions, is described as having a voice that humans find screechy and unpleasant... but that one of her own people finds to be "musical".
- Denshi Sentai Denziman: This trope forms the core of the Vader Clan's reason for invading Earth; they want to refit Earth to suit their twisted ideals of beauty.
- Fallout (2024): Norm manages to break out of Vault 31 with Bud's Buds in tow. In contrast to the Buds, his sister, and likely the viewer, he finds the ruins of Santa Monica to be beautiful.
- Game of Thrones: Brienne of Tarth is widely considered to be an ugly woman by Westerosi beauty standards, due to being mannish and serving as a knight and thus being muscular and strong versus being ladylike. Tormund Giantsbane, however, is absolutely head over heels for her from the moment he lays eyes on her because he comes from a culture where women are equal to men in every way, and a woman's strength is highly prized, to the point where it's a common courting practice for the men to kidnap the woman to demonstrate that he can protect her rather than the other way around.
- Kickin' It: In "Kickin’ It Old School", the boys meet Phil's niece, Mika. She’s considered quite attractive in America, but fails the beauty standards of her home country according to Phil (with her separated eyebrows, hairless nose, and lack of a tail).
- The Munsters: A Running Gag is that the family considers cousin Marilyn to be "ugly", because she's a normal, conventionally attractive girl living in a family of monsters that view everything backwards — she doesn't fit their personal ideal, so they assume she's hideous, though still love her dearly as family.
- Resident Alien: Harry is an alien who is (badly) disguised as a normal human man. While he eventually develops feelings for his attractive nurse Asta, these feelings happen despite her appearance, which arouses no reaction in his alien genitalia. On the other hand, he falls head over heels in love with Heather, a tall bird-woman whose true appearance terrifies humans and whose human disguise is a rather plain woman with a dull bob haircut. Amusingly, after he is temporarily turned into a human, he finds Asta attractive, but is so terrified of Heather that he calls a pause on their engagement until he regains his alien form. He has also mentioned that he finds ET to be, in his own words "a sexy idiot".
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Manhunt", a race of Fish People called the Antedians is introduced. Worf describes them as "a handsome race". The humanoid Lwaxana Troi, on the other hand, says the last time she saw something that looked like the Antedians, it was being served on a plate.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): The episode "Eye of The Beholder" is about a dictatorship that expects conformity in all things, including appearance. The twist is that the standard of beauty in this society is that of humans with sloping foreheads, piglike noses, and misshapen lips, and Janet, a beautiful woman by our standards, is considered a deformed freak and wants to get her face fixed to look "normal." The lesson of this episode is that what's considered beautiful and ugly is arbitrary and based on societal beliefs rather than any kind of objective logic.
Tabletop Games
- Pathfinder: Shelyn is the goddess of beauty who is worshiped by many different cultures and ancestries. As a result, her exact appearance varies based on the local area's standards of beauty. In addition, her appearance to those who view her is based on an individual's exact standards of beauty, meaning she appears differently to everyone.
Theatre
- Cabaret: In the Emcee's song, "If You Could See Her," he laments being the only one who thinks his love is beautiful, when no one else does. The other performer in the number, meant to represent his love, traditionally wears a monkey or gorilla suit with a frilly hat or dress. He loves her because of who she is, and wishes the world would understand. The last lines re-contextualize the entire song:
I understand your objectionOoh, I grant you the problem's not smallBut if you could see her through my eyes...She wouldn't look Jewish at all.
Video Games
- Catherine: Supplementary reading material like the novelization of the game shows that succubi like Catherine take on a form of whatever appeals to the current target they are wooing. In the game itself, Catherine appears to Vincent and by extension the player as a young, blond, white woman, but in the novel, she appears as a dark-skinned, blackhaired Hispanic woman◊ for Orlando, looks similar to Katherine◊ to Johnny, due to his unrequited love for her, while Steve saw her as a freckled Asian woman◊.
- Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten: In the "Fuka & Desco Show" DLC chapter, Torn Desco, a split clone of the Artificial Demon Desco, doesn't want Fuka to reincarnate because she'll effectively be a different person. In order to persuade Fuka into staying as herself, she gathers a group of demon hunks to act as a harem for Fuka. Fuka is at first excited, until she sees that the "hunks", are two living dragons and two undead dragons. While the regular Desco is attracted to them and worried that Fuka will be tempted, Fuka, being a human-turned-Prinny, is not at all tempted, and the only demons she's shown being remotely attracted to are humanlike ones such as Valvatorez (a vampire) and Fenrich (a Little Bit Beastly werewolf).
- Dispatch: One of the dialogue lines for Superman Substitute Phenomaman in Episode 6 reveals that he is considered ugly on his home planet of Urgot-52dc, so he is sensitive to any comments on his appearance, even if they are meant to be compliments. Played for Laughs.
Phenomaman: I am often bullied for my exquisite hair and beautiful masculine frame.Robert: That doesn't sound like bullying.Phenomaman: On my home planet, my form is reviled. Every compliment is a reminder that I am disgusting.Robert: No, come on. You look great.Phenomaman: [calls out] Robert is bullying me. Please ask him to stop.
- Honkai: Star Rail lampshades this with the quote related to Idrila, Aeon of Beauty:
"There is beauty in a stretch of fabric, in the lines of a poem, and in a few notes in a song — Welcome to an era where the idea of 'beauty' is absolutely worthless! How vulgar! How hopeless! How sad!"Fashion Guide of the Cosmos Chief Editor, Micheline von Tarantino
- Mass Effect 2: If Shepard and Garrus hook up, Garrus says that if Shepard were a turian he would be complimenting her waist or fringe. note He awkwardly tells her her hair looks good and her waist looks very supportive, and hopes that that’s not offensive to humans.
- Pokémon:
- Implied with the Beauty class, who use beautiful or cute Pokémon. While most use Pokémon considered conventionally cute or beautiful like Skitty, Lopunny, or Butterfree, some also use Pokémon that are scarier or odd-looking like Sharpedo, Gastly, or Huntail, implying that individual Beauties have their own standards.
- Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Only a tiny handful of Pokémon considered cute are allowed into Amity Square. Even Eevee, one of the cutest Pokémon, was not considered cute enough for Amity Square until the remakes. A Trainer can be found outside grumbling because they won't allow his Gyarados and Steelix to come in.
- Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire: In the remakes, Chaz is a Coordinator whose partner is a Machoke named Macherie, a Pokémon who looks like a muscular male bodybuilder. He thinks she is adorable and prefers to enter her in Cute contests, even though she would be better suited to Tough contests.
- In Orly's Draw-a-Story, the story "The Ugly Troll People" takes place in a village of trolls, who consider ugliness to be beauty. The story is about two sisters who compete to be the ugliest of them all.
Web Animation
- Helluva Boss: In "Spring Broken", Loona, a Hellhound, uses a Human Disguise, which resembles an attractive young adult goth girl, to seduce humans to lure them away to be assassinated. Her adoptive father Blitzo, who is an imp, calls her disguise "awful."
Web Original
- Fluffy Pony: Brightly colored fluffies are considered beautiful by other fluffies, while fluffies with darker colors like brown or black are considered ugly and often bullied, called "poopy babbehs." Alicorns are considered beautiful by humans and prized for their rarity, but other fluffies hate and fear them because they are so dumb their brains can't process the idea of a fluffy having both wings and a horn, calling them "munstah babbehs."
- This Tumblr post discusses a hypothetical remake of Beauty and the Beast (1991) starring The Muppets, where the Beast is played by a handsome human actor and considered an ugly monster by the Muppet townspeople. When true love breaks the curse, his handsome form has "blue felt and plastic eyes."
Webcomics
- Unsounded: While most of the continent finds plats, women or men, creepy due to their pale washed out coloring, short lifespans and altered connection to the khert in Alderode they are considered beautiful and plat women in Aldish cities are generally expected to be prostitutes so that men may enjoy them.
Web Videos
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Discussed; when Android 18 kisses Krillin, who is short, 17 asks if she's into dwarves. Her response?
18: What if I do? Societal definitions of beauty are BS anyway.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3: Kootie Pie Koopa is a vain narcissist who thinks she’s gorgeous, even though she’s ugly by human standards, being a bald, reptilian creature. Also, in "Recycled Koopa", when enchanted garbage starts transforming all the humans in New York and making them resemble King Koopa (becoming green reptile-people with tails), Bully Koopa comments that the humans have become "better-looking".
- The Amazing World of Gumball: In “The Slide” Gumball and Darwin are helping Rocky set up an account on Trawlr, a dating app. One of the first profiles they come upon is a live-action photo of a beautiful woman, but, being that they live in a world populated by an infinite variety of creatures of every possible shape, size and animation style, they find her absolutely hideous (ironic given the profile picture they used for Rocky, a muppet-like creature, was a live-action photo of a handsome man), comparing her to “a puppet made out of meat.” They find the next profile, a rock with cartoon eyes, much more attractive.
- When Anne the human is transported to Amphibia, a land where amphibians are the dominant species, the locals waste no time telling her that she's a hideous, horrifying monster. In "Breakout Star", she gets a major outbreak of zits, which endears her to the locals, thinking that they're 'ruby-red warts'. Once her outbreak's over, their opinion returns to before.
- Ben 10: Omniverse:
- In "Showdown", Rook reassures Kevin that he won't hit on Gwen by claiming that "Gwen is only attractive by human standards". To Gwen's chagrin, Ben confirms Rook's opinion saying there's "no comparison" between Gwen and the females of Rook's species. Gwen's patience runs out when Kevin then quips "So, to him, Gwen would be like an orangutan wearing glasses?" and she launches Kevin and Ben out of the ship.
- In the "Galactic Monsters" arc, the heroes go to Anur Transyl, a planet populated by species that look like monsters. The locals consider themselves normal, but they view Ben as a hideous monster. However, in "Charmed, I'm Sure", when Ben's face gets covered in big, gross pimples, he's able to blend in with the locals, and a little Transylian girl falls in love with him.
- Blue Eye Samurai: Throughout her life, Mizu has been hated by others because of her being half white (with her blue eyes being a dead giveaway to her heritage). While she's hardly hideous (she's actually fairly attractive), anyone who sees her blue eyes immediately knows that she's biracial. In Feudal Japan, that's the equivalent of being born with fangs and horns.
- The Boondocks: Uncle Ruckus is a self-hating black man who believes that only white women are beautiful, and as such sees all non-white women as ugly, as shown in "The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show" where he looks at a porn magazine with black women and reacts in revulsion, and in "Attack of the Killer Kung-Fu Wolf Bitch" where he assumes that Luna, who he's never seen himself, is ugly on the grounds that she's black despite several other men she's dated finding her attractive.
- Dungeons & Dragons (1983): "Beauty and the Bog Beast" sees Eric turned into a Bog Beast by the pollen of a strange flower. Bog Beasts are toadlike creatures. At the end of the episode, after Eric and his friends defeat a giant named Kowamung who was menacing the Bog Beasts, and a trinket of Kowamung's reverts Eric back to normal, the Bog Beasts he's saved express pity for him that his reward for saving them was that he turned "so ugly".
- Earthworm Jim: Princess What's-Her-Name and Queen Pulsating Bloated Festering Sweaty Pus-Filled Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt are both sisters from the same race, the Insectoids, the former being a beautiful Human Alien while the latter is a hideous anthropomorphic termite queen. Because of their race's standards, What's-Her-Name is seen as the ugly and deformed sister while Slug-for-a-Butt is seen as the beautiful sister.
- The Fairly OddParents!: Yugopotamians are a race of octopus-like aliens whose likes and dislikes are the opposite of humans' and fairies' in general, which includes beauty standards. As a result, Princess Mandie, who resembles a beautiful human-like alien, is considered hideous to them.
- Family Guy:
- Meg Griffin is considered In-Universe to be extremely ugly (though it's a case of Informed Deformity because she looks similar to her mom, Lois, who's regarded as beautiful). However, in the episode "Dr. C and the Women" she gets a job working at the TSA, where most of the people are extremely fat and she's regarded as the hottest woman there.
- In "Road to the Multiverse", one universe has an alternate Meg who is extremely hot to the main Brian and Stewie. According to Stewie however, even in this universe, Meg is considered one of the ugly ones.
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Duchess, an imaginary friend who resembles a Picasso painting, considers herself to be beautiful, but thinks her human caregiver, Frankie Foster, is ugly, despite Frankie attracting several admirers In-Universe while Duchess is considered ugly by others.
- Futurama: With her only eye, Leela looks terrifying to some men, but gorgeous to others (especially Fry). In the episode The Lesser Of Two Evils, it seems like Leela has been elected Miss Universe, but the actual winner look like a giant paramecium.
- Infinity Train: In "The Corgi Car", as King Atticus is escorting Tulip and One-One around Corginia, a kingdom full of sentient talking corgis, he points out a dog called Ugly Irwin, who makes Atticus shudder at his appearance. Cut to Irwin, a magnificent dog standing on a sunlit hill with his long golden fur flowing in the wind, implying that Irwin is only considered ugly because he is not a corgi like the rest of the citizens.
- Men in Black: The Series: Agent J once asks Frank, an alien disguised as a pug, if he could see what he really looks like. Frank refuses, stating that his real face is "even uglier than Cindy Crawford.''
- Tripping the Rift: T'nuk is considered ugly by her fellow shipmates (all of different species). She once protested against the concept of a beauty contest, but the receptionist of the contest was of the same species as her. He then assured T'nuk that she was beautiful, convincing her to take part in the contest.
