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"How'd you come up with the [bottle's] design?" "I don't know, it just came to me!"

A woman in comics or cartoons doesn't have ribs like a real actress does. Thus she can easily have a far narrower waist than would be possible with even the strictest of corsets - and usually without even wearing one!

A woman with an Impossible Hourglass Figure has generous curves, with an impossibly narrow waist as an unproblematic part of how she just happens to look. Thus taking the classic "hourglass figure" beauty ideal Up to Eleven. She's always designed to be attractive, even in the cases where she's not Ms. Fanservice or Hello, Nurse!: Monsters with insect-like narrow waists does not count, even if the shape reminds of a hourglass.

For more realistic hourglass figures, see instead Of Corsets Sexy and Of Corset Hurts.

No Real Life Examples, Please (it is, after all, impossible). This trope applies only to drawings and animation.

Examples of Impossible Hourglass Figure include:


Anime and Manga[]

  • Miss Doublefinger from One Piece.
  • Similar to the One Piece example we have several female characters from Fairy Tail and Rave Master. Mashima states that he actually doesn't find it especially appealing and he mainly uses the design to please young male fans.
  • The Gender flipped version of America in Axis Powers Hetalia.
  • Quite a few of the female characters have this type of figure in Code Geass, most notably Kallen and Milly.
  • In the time skip between her own comic in Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki and the Back To School Special comic Ibuki has filled out quite nicely as her breast appear to be the biggest out of all SF girls in the comic and while her pelvis matches Sakura and Karin's her waist appears to be more narrow than the other two, giving Ibuki quite a distinction with her waist compared to shoulders and hips.
    • In one shot in particular Ibuki's hips just flare out of her ninja costume's open spots.

Fashion Design[]

  • This Stella McCartney dress creates the optical illusion that the wearer has one of these.


Film[]


Live Action Television[]

  • 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 Hourglass figure. Of course, since no one in real life actually has one...


Newspaper Comics[]


Video Games[]

  • Vivi from Brain Dead 13.
  • Cyberswine: The Civilian Robots have incredibly skinny waists. Justified, because they are robots and they can be shaped that way without any health issues.
  • Valentina from Super Mario RPG, who has about the same proportions as her martini glass she's always carrying and is one of the few, if the only mario characters with noticable breasts.
  • The F-Zero series has two: Mrs. Arrow (debuting in X) and Princia Ramode (GX/AX).
  • Grunty from Banjo-Kazooie's Game Over screen.
  • The Dark Queen from Battletoads.
  • Jessica Albert in Dragon Quest VIII. Ditto for the elf maiden Rajah and the Witch-type enemies.
  • Veran from The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages.
  • Both Ringford Queen Elfaria and Queen Odette from Odin Sphere have pencil thin waists sandwiched in between huge breasts and wide hips. In Queen Odette case it makes sense considering aside from the breasts she is literately just skin and bone.
  • Lara Croft was one of these in the early installment of the Tomb Raider franchise, though her character design in later installments have been progressively averting this trope by widening her waist and shrinking her breasts. Since Tomb Raider Underworld, she now has a realistic hourglass figure.
  • Iroha from Samurai Shodown.
  • Taldeer, Macha, and the unnamed Farseers in the first Dawn of War game.
  • The beautiful Queen of Tumblers Salina from Drakensang.
  • Some females from the Shantae series. Notably NPC women around Scuttle Town.
  • Bunnie Rabbot of Sonic the Hedgehog, who is canonically described the Freedom Fighters' sex symbol.
  • Rumble Roses has many of it's Roses (human female wrestlers) nearing this category, though their waists are more of a realistic very narrow rather than as narrow as possible, but it's most literal example is Lady X Subsistance who is a robot created by Anesthesia and has a female figure with bigger breast and wider hips alongside a smaller waist than the Roses.
  • Hellen Gravely from Luigi's Mansion 3.
  • Morgan Le Flay from Tales of Monkey Island.


Web Comics[]


Western Animation[]