Tertiary Sexual Characteristics

Bows? Check. Lipstick? Check. Eyelashes? Check. Makeup? Check. Lots of pink? Check. Breasts? Half check. Jewelry? Check. Skirts? Check. High Heels? Check. No mistake, they're girls!

Ben: What makes you think it's a girl?
Kevin: Yeah, if it was a girl, it'd have a big bow on the side of its head or something.
—Ben 10 Alien Force

When they must assign gender to animals, inanimate objects, or even abstract concepts, writers and artists have hit upon an ingenious solution: Put a Bow on Her Head! Because it's Hair Decorations!

Writers tend to assume that for some reason most viewers will assume that the protagonist is a guy by default. So to make absolutely sure there's no Viewer Gender Confusion, developers will assign Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to the females. Occasionally, males will have some as well, but they tend to be much less obvious.

Note that many, many animals already have distinct sex-specific characteristics, though these are almost guaranteed to be totally ignored in designing fictional animal characters. The writers either Did Not Do the Research or assumed the viewers wouldn't know what they are.

The most common feminizing accessories include:

A bow, or, less commonly, a flower
Ears as Hair
Some type of jewelry, especially if the character is meant to be older
Pink or pastel "girly" color scheme.
Noticeable eyelashes, sometimes eyeshadow too
Midriff-baring outfit
Full lips (lipstick optional)
High heels, or a shape that suggests them.
Wearing a skirt (Amusing in the many situations where the equivalent male characters rarely wear pants, making most of them Half Dressed Cartoon Animals.)
Long Hair Is Feminine or heavily-styled hair with decorations, even if their species doesn't evenhavehair in real life!
Sometimes, all males are bald and only females have any hair.

Naturally, the list of masculinizing accessories is far more generic:

Wearing a baseball cap or top hat
Wearing a necktie or bowtie
Wearing pants
Not wearing pants
Blue, red, or darker colour scheme.
Baldness or short hair
Cigar Chomper
Mustache and/or beard
A scar
Having larger eyebrows
Larger feet

Occasionally, the only difference between a boy and a girl will be the location of the bow - if it's a bowtie, it's a boy, and if it's a hairbow, it's a girl. (The bow itself may even be identical.)

On the positive side, and that's a huge stretch, these gender identifiers are pervasive enough to be considered shorthand for viewers who may be hearing impaired. On the negative side, they are pervasive enough to lead to Viewer Gender Confusion for male characters with stereotypically "girly" traits, including many a Bishonen.

A Super-Trope to:

Examples of Tertiary Sexual Characteristics include:

Straight

Advertising

In two similar Swiffer commercials, an old-fashioned string mop is spurned by its owner, and seeks female companionship from other inanimate objects. One ad shows it courting a pink (hence female) bowling ball, and the other, a rake with a leaf daintily stuck to its tines where this trope would normally place a flower.
The green M&M.

Anime & Manga

In Pokémon Ash's Butterfree falls for another Butterfree, who just happens to be the only Pink Butterfree around (and this was before Shiny or gendered Pokémon were introduced in the main series).
- As it turns out, possibly as a Continuity Nod, Shiny Butterfree do have a pinkish tint, and have distinctly pink hands, feet, wings, and a mouth in the second generation.
- Toshiro Ono's manga also had a version of the Pikachu's Goodbye story where Pikachu hooks up with another Pikachu with a flower on its head, presumably intended to be female, with Ash's Pikachu being male.
- It also happens in Pokémon Special, where one of the main characters, Yellow, has a Pikachu that also has Flower in Her Hair, and is a mate to Red's own Pikachu.
- There's another episode where a female Charizard appears. No points for guessing how you tell.
- The end of one episode has three wild Muk falling in love with three other Muk. The latter are identified vaguely as female by their more feminine Pokémon-Speak voices, as well as having Blush Stickers.
In Digimon Frontier, eyelash difference is the only distinguishing feature between male and female KaratsukiNumemon.
The Shinigami Rem in Death Note has earrings and colored lips, and in the anime version her highlights were changed from dark blue to pastel purple. Despite this, she's often mistaken for male (possibly due to Ryuk having similar features already), though it's lessened now that there's an anime version with a feminine voice.
KouRyu and AnRyu of GaoGaiGar are basically just like the female Autobots, in pink and dark purple exteriors compared to primary colors.
- Note that all the other robots in the series have quite masculine faces, and the French Dragons have feminine faces and figures. Not to mention light-up breasts. Volfogg is also more purple than AnRyu, but that can be chalked up to his purple being the standard Ninja color.
Dolores in Zone of the Enders has a generally female shape, but nearly all the major Orbital Frames have somewhat androgynous shapes. She is, however, the only pink one. That would possibly make Jehuty (main game series) and Testament (Fist of Mars) subversions, as they have female AIs as well, but more masculine color schemes (Blue and brown, respectively) as more befitting their male pilots (Dolores has a male pilot too, but given her role as Robot Girl, pilots herself most of the time).
The Knight Sabers from Bubblegum Crisis come with rather silly high heels on their armour. Even the Fright Knights who were the rather bulky first concept for the suits had high heels.
Axis Powers Hetalia:
- Liechtenstein from wears a cute little ribbon, bought for her by her Onii-sama Switzerland. This was required since, without her previous long braided hair, she looked very much like a boy (which she attributes to her non-existent chest, but may very well be because she simply looks almost identical to her adoptive brother).
- Hungary was originally assumed to be male by everyone including herself. Then puberty hit her like a bombshell(not the first in the series), and so she started wearing a traditional Hungarian folk dress and a flower in her hair.
Dragonball Z has Vegeta and Nappa visit a planet inhabited by sentient bugs. The only female bug shown on screen is bright pink, but otherwise indistinguishable from the male bugs.
A Certain Scientific Railgun has Kongo's pet snake Ekatyerina wearing a pink bow. Justified in that there's usually no way to tell reptile genders apart without sticking your hand into a certain orifice and feeling up their... equipment.

Comic Books

Wellington Grey's Miscellanea^[dead link] gives female stick figures skirts (and occasionally a square head).
Minus illustrates the titular character's problem with lacking Tertiary Sexual Characteristics here. Many readers have probably thought she's a guy, too.
In all versions of The Moomins, the distinguishing sexual characteristics of Moomins seems to be largely limited to what clothes (if any) they wear. Snorkmaiden has her trademark hairstyle though.
- In the original books, Snorks and Moomins are different species, so to speak. And the white skin, incidentally, is fur - and Snorks can actually change the colour of theirs (though that was hastily forgotten after the first book Snorkmaiden and her brother appeared in).
- Averted for The Groke and Too-Ticky, who are female but have practically no gender clues. Several Finns have been surprised to find out the characters are female, as Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns to point this out.
- In the books, The Groke wears skirts (yeah, thats not her skin). Though so does Hemulen...
- Surely that averts the trope, then, because the book explicitly states that the Hemulen inherited that dress from HIS aunt.
Used a lot in the Swedish comic Bamse most commonly in that female characters tend to have much larger and detailed eyes than male ones.

Film

WALL-E has the chunky and functional (male) Wall-E next to the sleek (female) Eve. The other Axiom robots who are (presumably) male are more angled and squareish, reminiscent of Wall-E's cube shape. The sole exception is the hairstyling and makeup bot, which speaks in a female voice, subverting the trope. Part of the reason for Tertiary Sexual Characteristics is that closed captioning doesn't confer gender identification. The PR-T's are also all pink... save for a single blue one visible in the background in one shot.
In Shrek, Donkey doesn't realize that the dragon is a girl until she leans in close, into the light, and he can see she has long eyelashes as well as pinkish skin and some coloration to draw attention to the lips. Also a hint of purple on the eyelids, too. She looks like she has an enormous makeup mirror stashed somewhere in her treasure hoard.
- Also in Shrek, while Shrek hardly appears to have any hair at all (except in his ears), the ogre form of Fiona has a full head of hair.
- In the spinoff Puss in Boots the main cue that Kitty Softpaws is female is that she has long eyelashes, which don't appear till after she removes her luchadore mask and stay around when she puts the mask back on, maybe Puss was just being unobservant that day?
Just look at the cover of the film SpaceBuddies. Can you spot the token female? Look at the dog on the far left -- she has a bow. And a pink uniform.
Aside from their obvious manes, male lions in The Lion King have black ear markings. Lionesses have none. Oddly, when Simba first appeared as a newborn cub, he lacked these ear markings.
- The hyenas too feature this trope. The males have dark fur patches that resemble Perma-Stubble, while the only noticeably female hyena Shenzi has eye patches shaped like heavily applied eyeshadow, and a mane extending to having bangs and a fringe.
In the live-action Alvinandthe Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, the Chipettes have longer hair than the boys and eyelashes. They do wear clothes for the majority of the film, but their first scene has them arrive from the wild (no clothes) with no NonPrimate Breasts or Hartman Hips in sight. (And then later, they possess both features, which they shake during their big musical number.)
In Gremlins 2, one Gremlin gets into a potion that turns it female, resulting in long hair, a garish makeup job, and streetwalker clothes.
In the live action/CGI/animatronics Cats and Dogs dealt with the Tertiary Sexual Characteristics dilemma by having no female cats and picked a long-limbed and overtly slender breed of dog to play the one female dog character.

Literature

In one of the Miles Vorkosigan novels, Trooper Taura wears a pretty bow to make herself less fearsome to the kids they're rescuing. While she is visibly female, Taura is also... a large woman. And powerfully built. And she has fangs. And claws. Let's not forget the claws—in her introduction, she scratches through a heavy-gauge plastic forced hot-air pipe... and no, the nail polish she favors later does not hide them.
Discworld, of course, messes with this:
- Dwarf men and women look exactly the same. Originally it was frowned upon in dwarf society to openly identify their gender, but recently some females dwarfs have begun to wear makeup and dresses to differentiate. Amusingly, nearly all of these are derivations on what the others wear; Cheri is shocked at the idea of shaving, clarifying dwarfs still want to be dwarfs.
- When the extremely prim and proper Miss Maccalariat insisted that male golems could not clean the ladies' room, Moist re-named one of them Gladys and had "her" start wearing a blue gingham dress. He does rationalize any golem gender-identification is largely arbitrary, but was more disturbed by Gladys reading women's magazines and slowly acquiring a more obviously female personality. "She" starts to develop a crush on him too. If you thought he was disturbed when she started acting feminine, that's nothing compared to some of the happier sorts of thoughts that cross his mind when he cottons on that she's getting sweet on him.
- At one point he compares her to "the male golems", before reminding himself that they aren't male, any more than Gladys is really female.
- And what about the "boys" conscripted into the Borogravian Army in Monstrous Regiment? (Socks.)
In Joan Manley's She Flew No Flags, the young heroine discovers that her equally prepubescent male friend is really a disguised girl when she notices that "he" has pierced ears.

Live-Action TV

Also seen on Friends, when Rachel sticks a pink bow on Emma's head because everyone keeps saying, "What a cute little boy!"
Another baby example: Alfie/Stormageddon from the 2011 series of Doctor Who is dressed in blue, but Doctor Who Confidential reveals that the main "baby actors" in the episode are female twins.
An interesting example might be Power Rangers. With a few rare exceptions, when morphed, the female rangers (at least the ones that are female both here and in Japan) have a skirt wrapped around their suit. Considering the fact that usually female Rangers are pink, it's not likely confusion will occur.
Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger puts an interesting spin on this.
- The Gokaiger can copy the powers of past Ranger teams. A few of them have access to suits previously worn by the opposite gender - except the suits will gain or lose the skirts depending on who's wearing them. This is especially funny for GokaiYellow, since many of her predecessors were already gender-flipped by Power Rangers.
- Also, occasionally, a female ranger's helmet's had earrings. This stopped with Maskman and Fiveman, but it had been there since the beginning with Goranger (although, at least then, her earrings were bombs, so they were at least useful.) And then, there's Battle Fever J where Miss America had a feathered blond hairdo on top of her helmet.
As with Lola Bunny (see below), Abby Cadabby is a serious point of contention for some Muppet fans, and for many of the same reasons. Abby is a bright pink and purple Fairy Princess (it looks disturbingly like the character was designed by a marketing committee), complete with pigtails and a skirt. In contrast, very few other Muppet creatures on Sesame Street -or several other Muppet productions come to think of it- have any really obvious gender clues. Miss Piggy is the only one who springs readily to mind.
- Janice from the Electric Mayhem band has long blonde hair, huge black eyelashes, and enormous red lips.
- Word of God is that Abby looks different from the other female Muppets not because she's the girly girl (although she is), but because she's a Fairy. Apparently, the idea is that Fairies are a different puppet "ethnicity" (which may explain why she looks so much like the Sprites in Johnny and the Sprites).
- Zoe the Monster (Elmo's Distaff Counterpart) originally just had the generic "girly" eyes seen on some female Muppets and a somewhat soft color scheme as her tells. Lately, however, she's noticeably smaller and wears bangles and bows at all times—and occasionally wears a fluffy bubblegum pink tutu.
The Red Dwarf episode "Parallel Universe" featured Distaff Counterparts of all the cast (except the Cat). The "female" Skutter (a steel-blue utility robot with a claw-like hand and a single eye) was bright pink and had eyelashes and a 'skirt' around her chassis. Averted in Series V•III, which introduced a female Skutter called Madge who looked identical to every other Skutter. The Cat's parallel is, much to his disappointment, a humanoid dog.
In kids' cartoon series Captain Zed And The Zee Zone, the rather macho dream policeman Captain Zed has an assistant called PJ. In early series it is very, very, hard to precisely work out his/her gender, which subverts this trope. The best guess you can make is "maybe a tomboyish female. Or a teenage boy." Later series of Captain Z make it rather clearer: PJ is a normally endowed human female, physically recognisable as such by the usual secondary sexual characteristics, ie wider hips, facial features and a hint of bust.
On Mystery Science Theater 3000, the robot Gypsy has a high-pitched voice and over-sized lips

Newspaper Comics

Used in typically snarky fashion in Pearls Before Swine: The female crocs and pigs are identified by Simpsons-style beehive hairdos. Maura the non-anthropomorphic duck is given a hair (?) bow to distinguish her from her identical boyfriend Guard Duck - so that when they're both wearing helmets in a recent strip, her bow rides atop.
Gary Larson had some fun with this in The Far Side, and it's possible that the aforementioned Pearls Before Swine took some inspiration from him. Female characters (but usually not the cows) would usually wear ridiculous flower-print dresses, beehive hairdos, and fancy rimmed glasses.
Garfield's girlfriend Arlene has pink fur, eyelashes, and lipstick. She's also drawn to look more graceful and sinuous than Garfield.
- This has also caused decades of Viewer Gender Confusion for poor little Nermal. This is largely because Jim Davis has a tendency to depict baby animals with eyelashes regardless of gender. Even Orson Pig, who started out as a piglet in the US Acres strip, had this applied to him. But the ultimate example of this goes all the way to the eighth life in Garfield's Nine Lives special, where a very young Garfield and Odie are seen, and they too had eyelashes.
- Of course, in Nermal's case, the fact that he had a clearly female voice actor in the cartoon doesn't help with the confusion at all.
The writers of the Scamp newspaper comic decided to go against the Gender Equals Breed deal with Lady's and Tramp's puppies, and make one of Scamp's sisters a boy, giving Lady and Tramp two daughters and two sons. The only real difference between Scooter and his sisters Fluffy and Ruffy is that Fluffy and Ruffy have eyelashes and wear ribbons around their neck, and Scooter does not.
In Sherman's Lagoon, you can only tell Sherman and his wife Megan apart by Megan's pearl necklace and slightly darker coloring. In a brief arc where Hawthorne had a girlfriend, the two were distinguished solely by the girlfriend's having eyelashes. This didn't work well—some of the dialogue only makes sense if one assumes even the writer forgot which was which.
Luann uses this and inverts it. Most male characters other than Aaron are given dots for eyes, big round noses and simplistic bodies. The women almost always have full figures, pouty lips, droopey/sexy eyes, etc. Luann herself has a big round head and nose with a line for a mouth.
A Doonesbury comic in the Sunday paper a few years ago that featured a newborn baby. When asked by her grandmother what gender the baby was, the mother replied that she wasn't going to say, because it was the baby's one chance to be treated by people without gender preconceptions. The grandmother immediately begins gushing over the mischievous glint in its eyes and tiny fists that prove that it's a boy. When the mother exclaims that "it's a girl! A tough, strong girl!", the grandmother immediately shifts gears with, "Well, of course it is! Look at that precious dimple!"
In Pogo, the female citizens of Okefenokee Swamp usually wear aprons and/or bonnets, and Hepzibah wears a skirt. Lampshaded in an early strip when Miz Hop Frog successfully hides her gender from Pogo by simply removing her apron. Slightly later, Pogo complains about a butterfly who's decided to take up residence on his head because it makes him look like a girl.

Theater

The Bad Idea Bears from Avenue Q use the bowtie/hairbow version, plus the 'female' bear has eyelashes and a pearl necklace.

Video Games

Ms. Pac-Man has a bow on her head. In the Animated Adaptation, Sue, the Distaff Counterpart of Clyde, became a purple ghost with eyelashes and earrings.
- Ms. Pac Man also has an eyelash, and a mole, and if you look real closely, you can also see lipstick.
- Lampshaded in an exchange in Wayne's World, which provided this trope's alternate title:

"Well, she's got a bow on her head!"

- The minuscule difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man was played with in Drawn Together, where Pac-Man reveals that he is Ms. Pac-Man when he puts on the bow.
- One of the ads for a home video game system version of Ms. Pac Man had the titular yellow gobbling-disk try to convince us otherwise, by singing "Honey, don'tcha know / I'm more than Pac Man with a bow!".
Female avatars on Kingdom of Loathing have ponytails.
- Many of the alternate avatar images, as well. The male version of Vestments of the Treeslayer is a tree. The female version is the same tree, with a little bow tied to one branch.
The Paper Mario games do this quite a bit.
- Generic Toad NPCs are identified as female by having long hair and eyelashes, which is a little strange, given the Viewer Gender Confusion suffered by the original Toad over the years.
- Bombette, a female Bob-Omb, is pink, has a blond, braided fuse, and a heart-shaped windup key.
- Bow is a female Boo. In addition to long eyelashes, she also wears... well, doesn't her name make it obvious?
- But the generic Boo is also (usually) considered female, and has none of these tells. Boo's Japanese name is Teresa.
- Goombella is also pink, and she has a blond ponytail.
- Goombario wears a blue cap similar to Mario's, while his sister Goombaria wears an orange-red bow. And has a pink body. Their mother is also pinkish in color and wears a pink head kerchief, although their grandmother is brown and merely has a lacy cap. However, none of his three female relatives have hair, unlike Goombella.
- Ms. Mowz, a Mouser, has a heart-shaped tail and wears high heels.
- Interestingly, Watt and Sushie are aversions. Sushie otherwise looks like an ordinary Cheep-Cheep except for purple and orange coloring, and Watt, a Sparky, has only a pacifier (to signify that she's young).
- There's still some confusion among gamers regarding Watt's gender. The fact that the game refers to Watt as both male AND female at different points doesn't help either.
- Petuni, the only known female Puni (other than the Elder), can me distinguished by the pink orb on her antenna.
The female Chain Chomp that sometimes appears when the Pocket Chomp item is used in Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time has a bow on its head.
Averted in Super Mario RPG. At one point Mario and company encounter a Chain Chomp visually identical to every other Chain Chomp in the game. Bowser however is easily able to determine that it is a girl and then "acquires" her as a weapon that he can hurl at enemies.
Wendy O. Koopa of Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World has a pink hairbow, a pink shell, makeup, jewelry and high heels. Interestingly, despite being the only female Kooplaing, Wendy is one of only two Koopalings with no hair.
- Birdo from the Mario franchise deserves a special mention as being either played straight or subverted. It all depends on which appearances you're talking about and which country you're in.
Atropos, Robo's Distaff Counterpart, Duel Boss, and girlfriend from Chrono Trigger, is pink and wears a bow. In fact, after you beat her in her Duel Boss fight versus Robo, she gives you her ribbon as a special Robo-only equippable item.
In The Sims 2, you can build male and female Servos (robot butlers). The male looks like a generic robot, but the female looks like the male with a pink bow and lipstick.
- In My Sims, Sims are technically neither, though the specific characteristics they're given tell the tale. The player-controlled Sim can be given any available characteristics you want. (Feminine voice, eyelashes, and attire with a masculine hairstyle and a five-o'-clock shadow? Go for it!)
- In MySims Kingdom, on the other hand, you choose a gender for your Sim, and that puts a limiter on what your Sim can wear, what kind of hair is available, etc.. Sometimes, it changes what outfits you get as a reward. For example, there's a reward that lets males choose from a selection of outfits that are shorts-only; females get two-pieces, some with shirts over them (split near the bottom).
Gender-specific physical differences were created for some Pokémon in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and carried forward for future games. Fortunately, they mostly tend to be arbitrary markings or based largely on gender differences in reality, so good on Game Freak's part. Female Wobbuffet appear to wear lipstick, but it's just for the lulz.
- Prior to this, the few gender-dimorphic Pokémon had their obviously different male and females listed as separate species! Male Volbeat is red and has a glowing tail, female Illumise is purple and doesn't. As a maybe-intentional subversion/inversion of the typical blue/pink color scheme, Nidoran-line females are blue/indigo, but the males are pink/purple.
- Think you want to mess with a purple Nidoking?
- Note that the Pokémon that get different stats based on their gender are actually very different. The male and female Nidoran lines learn entirely different moves and have differing stats. Some Pokémon only exist as a certain gender (no male Combee will ever evolve into a Vespiquen, for example).
- Female Pikachu have heart shaped tails.
Neopets didn't always have gender differences, but after the pet artwork received a global update, female pets gained conspicuously longer eyelashes over their male counterparts—or, in the case of the insect-like species: partially-closed eyes.
When Amy Rose first appeared in Sonic the Hedgehog CD, her defining sexual characteristics are being pink (a contrast to Sonic's blue), eyelashes, and a skirt. When she was redesigned for Sonic Adventure, her femininity was more emphasized by changing her hairstyle (up until then, it was exactly the same as Sonic's), giving her an actual bust size, and giving her large golden bracelets to wear on her wrists. Another good one is Sally. In the Fleetway comic she had a bow on her head. Archie gave her secondary characteristics.
- Played straight with most characters in the games, where the only differences are eyelashes and clothing styles.
Now that it's no longer a secret that Samus Is a Girl, Samus's Powered Armor in the Metroid series has undergone a slight-but-noticeable makeover to make the gender of its wearer more obvious. It possess a rather slender waist and a large Breast Plate, and its visor is now more obviously transparent, usually showing off Samus' eyes... and her rather long eyelashes.
In The Movies, the full-body animal costumes are the few unisex outfits, because they replace the character model for the actor rather than fitting over it. Except, the gorilla suit has a male and a female variant. The lady gorilla has a bow and lighter fur (but, curiously, no cleavage!) And no, you can't cross dress it; it always matches the gender of the actor.
In Nuts & Milk, Yogurt looks exactly like Milk with the addition of two pink bows on her head.
In Ice Climber, Nana (the P2 character) is just the Popo sprite with a pink parka instead of blue.
In Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Rareware apparently got tired of the years of people going "Kazooie's a girl?!", so they re-made her appearance. She now has long eyelashes, "curly" hair, and a more curvy look, to make her more obviously female. And then, once you beat the game, she starts wearing a bow-tie (yes, it's a bow, but it's a masculine bow).
The protagonist of I Wanna Be the Guy, The Kid, gets a bow in his hair on Normal Mode, to suggest the less than masculine choice of playing on the easiest setting As if the extra save points with "WUSS" written on them weren't enough of a clue. Ayane gives Ryu one in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden if he selects Ninja Dog mode.
All over the place in the Kirby series, where characters are given bows to show that they're female. It's most obvious with Chuchu the octopus and Ribbon the fairy. The only two exceptions seem to be Keke and Adeleine. This caries over into the fandom, where fanmade female characters are usually given a bow, or at least big ol' eyelashes.
- Also, the blue Lololo's distaff counterpart Lalala is pink and wears a bow.
- Taken to the extremes with Kaboola/Kabula, an airship boss in Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby Super Star Ultra. Her most recent redesign has eyelashes painted on her hull.
- Many male characters in this series tend to have big bushy eyebrows.
The protagonists of Bubble Symphony, a sequel to Bubble Bobble: Coro and Kulu, the female duo Beta Couple to Bub and Bob.
- And Pab and Peb, the new Beta Couple in Bubble Bobble Plus (Wii Ware). (See the Title Operations Guide in the Wii Shop Channel.)
- Rainbow Islands: Three out of eleven random people who have all been imprisoned in The Alcatraz and transformed into green bubble dragons are female and thus have a pink bow on their head.
In Twinbee, one of the ships (not just the pilot of said ship, the ship itself) is female. How can you tell? Winbee is pink. Later adations have also shown that her cockpit is shaped like a heart, though this is somewhat excused - with two rounded bumps on top, it also shows she's the second 'bee ship. Twinbee, the original, has a round cockpit (one "bump"), while Gwinbee, the third, appears to have a rounded arrow pointing down (three bumps on the top part of the cockpit).
In Final Fantasy IX, female Moogles are distinguished from the males by wearing pink vests.
In one quest from Final Fantasy Tactics A2 you rescue a kidnapped Seeq beauty queen, and you see in her portrait that she looks exactly like a male Seeq viking but with lipstick.
In Kingdom Hearts, the Bouncywild, the Distaff Counterpart of the monkey-like Powerwild, has blond pigtails. And a bow.
Nintendo's Miis have all the same facial and hair combinations, however males wear a shirt and pants and females wear a dress that flares out.
The female Kongs in the Donkey Kong Country series have long, blonde hair.
Pablo Sanchez of Backyard Sports has a baseball cap, is bald, and wears shorts. In every game except Skateboarding where he wears a helmet.
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Why can you tell Zelda apart from the other Animated Armors? Because she's freakin' pink!!

Random Phantom: (to Zelda) YOU SEEM CUTER THAN USUAL. WHY.

- In Oracle of Ages, the Maku Tree in Labrynna has long eyelashes, ganguro-style makeup, and a large flower low in her branches.
Lampshaded in Ace Attorney Investigations by Edgeworth, where he objects to its use on the Pink Badger, the Blue Badger's Distaff Counterpart.

Edgeworth: I suppose this is the Pink Badger? But since it has the same design, doesn't it seem forced to call this one a female?
Kay: You think so? I mean, just look at how long her eyelashes are!
Edgeworth: That's the only difference.
Kay: And the fact that she's pink.
Edgeworth: Yes, and?
Kay: And her lips are red! See, lipstick!
Edgeworth: (thinking to himself) What? She has nothing to say about the giant pink ribbon, or is that too obvious?

In Spyro the Dragon: A Hero's Tail, girl dragon Ember is pink, has a necklace, and has a heart-shaped tail tip.
In Year Of The Dragon, some of the female dragons hatch out of their eggs already wearing a bow. What.
All Creatures games exhibit a mix of this (many official breeds differ by hairstyle, two have makeup on the females, and one C1 breed had pinkish females and bluish males) and more typical sexual dimorphism (different coat colors, horns on male Fallow Norns.)
Bandage Girl in Meat Boy series wears a distinctive flower.
In Animal Crossing, your player character will wear a t-shirt and shorts if they're a boy, and a dress if they're a girl. They'll also each have a different set of hairstyles(though at one point in the game, girls can get boy haircuts and vice versa.)
Gokujou Parodius and Otomedius G have the giant female Moai head Yoshiko, who wears lipstick and earrings. The latter game reveals that it's not her real face.
In Chack'n Pop, Miss Chack'n can be told apart from Mr. Chack'n by the ribbon in her hair.

Webcomics

Faux Pas has foxes where the females have slightly darker fur and eyelashes, as well as makeup-style fur around their eyes. The humans in the comic are likewise confused. Randy, a male red fox, even was miss April once: "Some humans are weak on details".
Xkcd typically distinguishes female from male stick-figure characters by giving the former hair.
As does Cyanide & Happiness, which makes male baldness a plot point in #1231 where a mom with twin daughters shaves one's head to help tell them apart, and others assume the shaved daughter is a boy.
Kay Wai Jellese/Kaye Haychold in Jennifer Diane Reitz's webcomics Unicorn Jelly and To Save Her^[dead link] . Kay/Kaye (like the author) is actually male but transgendered, as her species defines that. In Unicorn Jelly she's a conical blob with eyes and a mouth and wears a bow that's held in place on her "forehead" by a small stud. In To Save Her she (or a version of her) assumes humanoid form (with a female figure)) and still wears a bow on her forehead.
In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, after one of the lobster-like Pirates of Ipecac is suddenly revealed as female, she is then always portrayed with eyelashes and slightly rounded curves on all the pieces of her shell. Up till this point, both pirates had been drawn identically. Since the transition occurs between panels of the same strip, Cleaveland is probably Hanging A Lampshade on this trope.
In Pokey the Penguin female characters are just smaller copies of Pokey with a bow or colored down on their heads.
In the almost never safe-for-work Oglaf, there is a specific reference to the Bow of Shame.
Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name has a bat with lipstick, eyelashes, and possibly eyeshadow. It's a bit justified by the fact that she's a vampire who has shapeshifted into a bat, and therefore has retained some of the traits she has in her more humanoid shape. (There's a vampire who, in bat-form, continues to wear glasses.)
Lucy in Bittersweet Candy Bowl wears a bow for this reason. Or did. Puberty has since fixed this problem, but she still does out of likely habit.
Schlock Mercenary has elephants with eyelashes.
Fruit Incest mostly averts this. Nelly looks exactly like Wally but with a horn. Dahlia has long eyelashes, but that's more to do with her personality than anything else.
- Also inverted with Molo and Zeke. They're both male, but Zeke has a feminine tuft of hair, curlier whiskers, and lighter colored fur.

Web Original

Dorf Quest: The girls are pink! And the gods, Blue.
Zero Punctuation features red bows on female imps.
In the Homestar Runner cartoon "Costume Commercial", the ghosts used as decoration are typical white blobby ghosts, until the announcer says "and for the ladies..." at which point it's a pink background and the ghosts have bows on their heads.
Lampshaded by The Nostalgia Chick in the Mulan review (after Samus is revealed to be a girl):

Lindsay: (as Mulan) At least I have eyelashes again.

Female Neopets can be distinguished from male ones by the fact they have visible eyelashes.
Off White: Kaya, the female wolf Iki takes a liking to, has eyelashes. Very ugly eyelashes, even the co-author doesn't like them. Thankfully they are only visible in closeups.

Western Animation

The Smurfs:
- The evil wizard Gargamel takes his revenge on the Smurfs by creating a 'Smurfette' to trick them. While the male Smurfs all wear white pants and had very little hair, the original Smurfette had long black hair and a white dress. In a nutshell, the Smurfs disapproved of her because she wasn't a real Smurf. So Smurfette visited Papa Smurf, and he turned her into a pretty blond in a sexier white dress, heels, long eyelashes, and a flirty attitude. Unfortunate Implications and gender stereotyping in one fell swoop. No wonder poor Smurfette has a trope named after her—and it isn't a positive one either.
- A second and third Smurfette (named "Sassette" and "Nanny Smurf" respectively, to avoid confusion) were introduced latter. Sassette (who is also an artificial Smurf) wears pants, like the male smurfs, but hers are pink and she has long, red hair, which she wears in Girlish Pigtails. Likewise, Nanny Smurf (Who knows where she comes from) is identified as female by having hair and female voice. It should also be noted that all three Smurfettes have notably smaller noses than the male smurfs.
In the Ewoks animated series (yes, there was such a thing), Kneesaa had a pink cloak. However, she was the only character distinguished in this fashion; for everyone else, you had to rely on memory.
Haley Long in American Dragon: Jake Long. She doesn't have the bow, but when she transforms, she always has her hair. Though this seems to be true for all the characters when they transform, male or female, her dragon form is also pink. When Fu Dog is showed macking on a female dog, she usually has a bow, lipstick, and/or a sparkly collar. Hey, Fu digs the girly-girls.
Care Bears come in all colors - though a female Bear's fur tends to be more noticeably pastel. And nearly all of the pink-furred characters are female by default. In some series, they even wear girlie clothes too. (Note that this applies to cases where the writers had made up their minds as to who was what.)
There's an episode of The Fairly OddParents where Timmy wishes everyone would look exactly the same. Everyone turns into a gray blob... and the female characters have gray lipstick and heavy eyelashes. In one episode, Timmy accidentally wished he was a girl... and was turned into a girl with a ponytail, a bow, eyelashes, lipstick, a blouse, and a skirt.
In their heyday, the Looney Tunes inadvertently became the Talking Animal equivalent of a sausage party. Over the years, attempts were made to add some ladies into the cast for a more even gender balance. The results were... mixed:
- Babs Bunny in Tiny Toon Adventures has the eyelashes, the bow (one for each of her ears, in fact), and a skirt, and her fur is bubble-gum pink. Similar tells are on Shirley the Loon (long hair/feathers, a dress, and a bow) and Fifi LaFume (a bow and purple fur). The good news is, their personalities were strong enough to transcend these obvious cues.
- Originally, Lola Bunny from Space Jam was going to be little more than a pink-furred, shorter version of Bugs. Oddly, Warner Brothers toned down her Tertiary Sexual Characteristics too much. This was an attempt to avoid upsetting anyone, especially the merchandise makers. But the story goes that the McDonald's execs took one look at the prototype toys and outright refused, saying that there was no way that they would accept Bugs Bunny flirting with a rabbit who looked like a 10-year-old boy.
- Speaking of Lola. She stands as a point of major contention for fans of the Classic Looney Tunes, and it's partially because her gender-specific traits are so obvious. It makes the addition of a female member to the cast seem all the more forced. She even had the hair bow in Baby Looney Tunes.
- This trope is pervasive enough to have caused decades of Viewer Gender Confusion for poor little Tweety Bird. He even used to be pink (changed to yellow when Moral Guardians thought he looked too naked). Oh, but now Word of Executive says Tweety is female? Look at that. Guess he had a sex change after I Taw a Putty Tat.
- Subverted in "Back Alley Oproar". Sylvester (before his Flanderization to Tweety's Butt Monkey) hands off a bit of sheet music to a big orange cat who looks stereotypically male (and the thing is, it's hard to say exactly how). She proceeds to sing a lovely soprano aria from an opera—before getting hit with a rifle butt.
- That said, whenever Daffy is mackin' on a lady duck, she tends to have very obvious tells.
On the Disney side, in early cartoons, Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck would be virtually indistinguishable from their respective beaus if it weren't for the lashes, hair bows, heels and skirts. In an interesting footnote, Minnie seemed to favor going topless, while Daisy's skirt barely covers her bare bottom. Not that there's anything there to hide, but...
- Interestingly enough, take a look at some of the characters who popped up in Mickey and Minnie's wake and you'll come away with the impression that Minnie was the Trope Maker for "Well, she's got a bow on her head!"
- More recent designs of the two characters have toned down their more obvious tells. In particular, Daisy now looks more graceful and feminine (for a waterfowl) and less like Donald Duck in a dress. She has also acquired some Non-Mammal Mammaries. Even in the classic days various artists differed in their ability to make them look feminine. The Art Evolution went towards the obvious side of this trope.
- House of Mouse lampshades this by mentioning Minnie's obsession with hairbows, sometimes making it part of the plot. In one episode Mickey and Donald had to crossdress as their own girlfriends (pictured above)...
Oddly, only Blossom of The Powerpuff Girls has the hair bow, though she and her sisters are all in dresses, and all look like little freakish bigheads as do the Rowdyruff Boys, and the counter-Blossom has the baseball cap tell.
Phil and Lil on Rugrats pretty much have to do this as they are fraternal twins distinguished solely by their voices and gender-appropriate clothes. They frequently switch around to confuse their parents. They also had different shaped ears.
- They have different colored shoes, Lil wears a dress, and Phil has pants.
Yin Yang Yo is all over the place. Yin herself has the eyelashes and the hairbow. Her friend Lena seems to get by on just lipstick. The Aardvark Princess has the clothing, but neither lipstick nor bows. Villain Smoke has the secondary sexual characteristics. No bows, no lipstick, but a Sailor Scout type outfit, and big breasts. Villain Saranoia has the secondary sexual characteristics, as well as the lipstick. Carl's mother has the lipstick but not the clothes or the breasts. The Chung Pow Kitties all have the eyelashes and bows. Which is justified, because they communicate only with kittenlike meows. One really couldn't tell without the eyelashes and bows.
Panini of Chowder has the eyelashes and the girly color scheme, but wears a sweatband around her ears rather than a bow.
- Also, in the "Thrice Cream Man" episode: compared to the titular creature, which is an aqua-blue blob of living thrice cream, the Thrice Cream Woman is pink (strawberry-flavored?) with lipstick, eyelashes and breasts.
The short-lived series Sitting Ducks pokes fun at this concept, by having the main character Bill be completely unidentifiable (even being mistaken for a girl at least once) until he is given a bow to wear around his neck. All the ducks are identical, and are only distinguished by their clothes. Some of the female ducks wore makeup and jewelry, except for Drill Sergeant Duck, who lacked every tell except the actress (who was an alto). This was so prevalent that in one episode the aversion was lampshaded. ("Stop calling me sir, I AM A LADY!")
Early female Transformers always had breasts or breast-like torso armor, "feminine" coloration (pinks or pastel shades), narrow waists, and hips. Some modern ones however, aren't like this, sometimes due to being characters whose toys were originally molds used for male characters, other times just due to being less conventional character designs.
- Character: Thunderblast. Episode: "Memory". Robot nipples.
In The Land Before Time, females tend not to appear particularly different from males, although in some art, Ducky and Cera are given near-pastel color schemes. In the fourth film, a guest character called Ali is written in, who is the same age and species as Littlefoot, although a different gender. To get the effect, Littlefoot's design is copied, but the eyelashses are lengthened slightly, eye colour is changed from red to blue and her overall colour is slightly redder. Another new female character, an Oviraptor, is added into the series—and she's pink. And she's named "Ruby", presumably to help the color-blind. Amusingly, Ali's appearance evidently isn't enough to establish her gender to the other characters—Ducky checks.
- In the original movie, Littlefoot's gender isn't mentioned. I don't know if this is true but I heard it was left intentionally vague.
Most of the female robots in Futurama are like this (with some notable exceptions).
- Bender gets hammered into Fembot shape in one episode, including reworking implied genitals that he has never demonstrated before or since—his lack of such was vital to saving him from the Space Amazons. Another episode had a robot with an obvious "fembot" figure that turned out to be anything but... at least until "she" finished her payments. And the Crushinator may be a piece of big, clunky Lunar farming equipment, but she's still pink, sporting pigtails, and still female... still has a woman's needs.
- There's also the female Nibblonians, with ribbons on their eyestalks and long eyelashes—though oddly enough, their race also has a more realistic sexual dimorphism in the males having larger canines.
- The bows and eyelashes are also somewhat justified here, as that makes the girl Nibblonians even cuter!
Female animals in the Ice Age movies tend to have longer eyelashes, lighter colored fur and, when applicable, obviously feminine bodies. Female sloths in particular have girly "hair" and what appears to be lipstick. In the audio commentary for Meltdown, it is joked by the character designers that they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they'd just stuck a bow on Ellie's head rather than try to modify Manny's design to make it feminine. Dawn of the Dinosaurs features Skrat facing off against a female skrat for an acorn. Scratte has dark foxy coloring, a significantly curvier body, eyelashes, and blue eyeshadow. She may possibly also be a separate species since, like female gelflings, she can glide.]]
Lilo and Stitch's spinoff series has Angel, who is a copy of Stitch but with a very high-pitched voice, pink fur, long eyelashes, an hourglass figure, and long antennae that look like hair. She has a heart marking on her back in her first episode. Her special power involves singing, which causes anyone that used to be evil to turn evil again.
This may have been an attempt to get around the all-too-common Reptiles Are Abhorrent effect, but Master Viper in Kung Fu Panda has eyelashes, flowers on her head, and "lipstick"; pretty much the opposite of Master Tigress (see below).
- This also suggests that it may be a deliberate choice on the part of the character, who seemed a bit more secure in both her femininity and her martial prowess than the Proud Warrior Woman Tiger.
Female Irkens in Invader Zim have long eyelashes and curled antennae. Tak and Invader Tenn are the only female Irken characters (aside from Tallest Miyuki, whose episode was never finished), but several Irken with the same traits show up in crowd scenes, and are presumably female as well. To be fair, this may be the only difference between male and female Irken, as it's heavily implied they don't even reproduce sexually.
The Darkwing Duck episode "Trading Faces" swaps Darkwing and Goslyn's bodies. The only physical change made to them was that Darkwing's body had eyelashes and Goslyn's body had none.
Sartana of the Dead from El Tigre is an undead skeleton headed woman. She wears a dress, has lipstick and eyelashes, as well as Hartman Hips.
In Happy Tree Friends, Giggles, Petunia, and Lammy all have long eyelashes. Petunia wears a flower on her head, while Giggles and Lammy have hair bows.
Very subtly done in Happy Feet. The female Emperor penguins have purple undersides under their beaks and males have orange. The females also have their chest feathers shaped to vaguely resemble breasts.
In Animaniacs, Dot has a yellow flower around her ears (which sometimes appears with a pink bow), a pink skirt and on fancy occasions wears a pink dress and matching jewellery. She also has tufts of fur from the side of her face that make her look like she has a pixie-like haircut. Rita the cat has eyelashes, as does Slappy Squirrel, who also has a hat with a flower on it. On the male side, Yakko and Wakko have shorter hair than Dot, with Yakko wearing pants (oversized slacks with a large belt) and Wakko not, although he does wear a blue sweater and red baseball cap. The Hip Hippos also had a Pink Girl, Blue Boy color scheme.
Inverted in the series What-a-Mess. Well-groomed Afghan Hounds naturally have long hair on their heads, and long hair that tends to make them look like they're wearing fancy clothes. Despite all this, the Afghan Hound protagonist, What-a-Mess, is a male dog. However, this trope is played straight with the cat, Felicia. She has long eyelashes and a bow.
In kids' show Dive Olly Dive, the female submarine has curly eyelashes, pink eyeshadow, and a heart-shaped headlight.
Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (the stop animation one) has Claurice, a doe that Rudolph is attracted to. How do we know Claurice is female? Well, she has no antlers for one thing, but she also has lighter fur, eyelashes and a bow on her head. Yup, definitely a female deer.
- Except for the fact that both reindeer sexes have antlers. In fact, the females shed theirs later in the year than the males do; the reindeer that have no antlers by Christmas are the old males.
The female locomotives from Thomas the Tank Engine were all specifically designed after real locomotives that appear "feminine" to the show's writers. For example, Daisy has eyelashes and lipstick, Mavis and Flora both have cowcatchers and runningboards that resemble skirts, both Emily and Molly have large drive wheels, Rosie and Lady are both colored pink, and Belle's smokebox is extended in a way so that she appears to have long hair.
In My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, to tell male ponies from females you have to look at their eyelashes and chin structure (unless they really want to let you know). This becomes important in the case of the Wonderbolts, who wear goggles. There are however a couple of mixed and non-standard character designs in the background cast, which have been cause for endless confusion.
- The main difference seems to be the size of the male ponies who are always 1/2 or 1 head taller than all the famales. For ponies, who are 3 heads tall, is a huge diference.
- Female phoenixes have pink feathers and different head feathers. At first, however If you know much about real birds sexual characteristics you will know that the smaller pink Phoenix is the male (or just look at the confirmed female Phoenix, Philomena).
Parodied and subverted in A Bugs Life, where Francis, a male ladybug, has long eyelashes, full lips and a Beauty Mark.
In The Simpsons, only females have visible eyelashes.
One episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had Jimmy making a Dagwood Sandwich and then using it as a Companion Cube. He made it female be putting a ribbon on it.
This trope is played with quite commonly in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "From Here to Maternity". The situation involves shopping for essentials for a baby that Filburt and Dr. Hutchison are expecting to be hatched from an egg while Heffer nurtures it. Filburt and Heffer obviously expect the little tyke to be of opposite genders, considering that instances involve Heffer picking out a frilly pink dress while Filburt picks out a football jersey. There is even a montage involving Filburt playing baseball with the egg and teaching it how to shave, while Heffer dresses the egg up in a tutu and dances ballet with it and plays tea party with the bowed egg.
On an episode of Bugged, a female bug appeared who was differentiated from the (presumably) male central bug by having bows on her attenna and lipstick.

Other

There was this one a painting of a teddy bears' picnic where the 'female' bear was wearing a pink ribbon and a skirt (but nothing else), while the 'male' bear wore neither. This has the disturbing implication that he was exposing himself to her.
Mostly averted in Bionicle, however Roodaka has long "hair" and something that resembles earrings. In one of the web animations, Hahli and Macku were shown wearing flowers on their masks, but it was a special occasion and they haven't been seen doing it since.
The Big Brother Ponies were, realistically, a bit larger than other Ponies (all female). They also had overall bolder color schemes, and were given hilariously exaggerated "masculine" names, accessories, and occupations. (The Fandom has not ignored the fact that the hats and collars given to the Big Brothers make them look like some kind of equine Village People tribute band.) However, their most prominent designating male feature was... big hairy feet. Because draft horses in Real Life are a One-Gender Race. Uh...
The LEGO Life on Mars theme has the female Martian Cassiopeia, whose gender is distinguished from the male Martians by her eyelashes.
In the Finnish comic The Swearing Hedgehog female hedgehogs have eyelashes to distinguish them from male ones. Except for the main character's grandmother, who is recognisable by being nearly bald and even more foul-mouthed than the title character.

Real Life

Human babies. Without their little pink or blue onesies, they're relentlessly androgynous.
- They have actually done several social experiments with this. The point of the experiment was to show how people treat girl and boy children differently. Each time they would just use one baby and just give it different clothes (pink and bows for a girl, blue and maybe a sports shirt for a boy). No one could tell the difference.

"Is it a boy or a girl, doctor?"
"I think it's a little early to start assigning gender roles, don't you?"

- To many observers, a frilly blanket implies that the baby's a girl, even if the blanket is blue.
- In a hospital's neonatal ICU, you can tell which of the scrawny plum-colored creatures in the Isolettes are the girls: they're the ones with a loop of pink ribbon, in the rough semblance of a bow, gently taped to their bald heads.
It is sometimes hard to tell clothed boys from girls before puberty just by looking at them, aside from hairstyles and clothes differences.
- Likewise, many children are naturally androgynous due to them lacking obvious sexual characteristics and voice types being more variant. It's not unusual to see a girl with a rather deep or scratchy voice, or a boy with a feminine one. The voice type typically relates to how people talked to the baby as an infant.
  - Women and teen and tween girls have voice types that are every bit as variant as that of prepubescent girls. It's boys voices that get distinctly deeper become less variant in types as they hit puberty. It's not unusual to see a women with a rather deep or scratchy voice, but it is unusual to see a man with a convincingly feminine one.
  - This does not extend to their brains; developing humans have receptors which detect androgens (male hormones) and rewire the developing brain. Differences between one's genetic sex, anatomical sex, and brain can cause tragic Gender Identity Disorder. Other cases came about due to mutilation of external anatomy or societal pressure to preferentially have children of one gender. Consider this boy raised as a girl and this Tear Jerker in Afghanistan. It is common enough to feature as the central plot to Afghanistan's first movie since the Taliban fell.
The only thing distinguishing the man from the woman in bathroom signs is a dress on the latter.
- Attempts at doing something different (such as one Scottish sign showing men in kilts and women with extremely large breasts) can be hilarious. Visible here.
- It's true when we talk about stylistically neutral signs. More stylistic signs are more versatile, but it usually is either clothes (skirt vs. trousers, suit vs. dress), footwear (flat heel vs. high heel) or headwear (top hat vs. lady's hat).
The most noticeable difference between the mascots of the NBA's Charlotte (now New Orleans) Hornets and the WNBA's Charlotte Sting (now defunct), other than the gear of their respective teams? Eyelashes.
Banksy's Happy Chopper piece, painted on a wall in Shoreditch in 2003 (the special effects were supplied by deep fat fryer).

Exceptions