红颜祸水
hóng yán huò shuǐ
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 紅顏禍水
A beautiful woman seen as the cause of a man's downfall or a country's ruin; the idea that beauty brings disaster. A traditional, sexist cliché, now often quoted critically or with irony.
Người đẹp là mầm tai hoạ: quan niệm xưa đổ lỗi cho phụ nữ đẹp khi một người đàn ông sa ngã hay một triều đại sụp đổ. Nay thường được nhắc với ý phê phán hoặc mỉa mai.
Register: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 062 (2026-11-13). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 颜/顏 = nhan; etymology of “hồng nhan hoạ thuỷ” = 紅顏禍水 · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “hồng nhan hoạ thuỷ” (hong-nhan-hoa-thuy). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “红颜祸水” mean?
A beautiful woman seen as the cause of a man's downfall or a country's ruin; the idea that beauty brings disaster. A traditional, sexist cliché, now often quoted critically or with irony. Literally: rosy face, waters of disaster
Is “红颜祸水” formal or informal?
红颜祸水 is generally neutral.