skin-deep

alternative skin deep

1. figurativelynot comparableShallow, superficial.

   The painter smiled at once, his bright, skin-deep smile.

   1919 October, John Galsworthy, chapter 1, in Saint’s Progress, London: William Heinemann, published December 1919, →OCLC, part III, page 242

   5 more examples

   Dead enough; to live thenceforth a galvanic life of mere Stump-Oratory; screeching and gibbering, words without wisdom, without veracity, without conviction more than skin-deep.

   1850 May 1, Thomas Carlyle, “No. V. Stump-Orator.”, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, page 180

   Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature’s good-humour was only skin-deep after all.

   1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC

   “He calls himself a white man,” answered the Master-Attendant scornfully; “but if so, it’s just skin-deep and no more. I told him that to his face too.”

   1902, Joseph Conrad, “The End of the Tether”, in Youth: A Narrative: And Two Other Stories, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and sons, →OCLC

   Olga de Coude is very beautiful; that, and the dim light and the seductive surroundings, and the appeal of the defenseless for protection, might have been resisted by a more civilized man, but my civilization is not even skin deep—it does not go deeper than my clothes.

   1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 49

   She was wantonly aesthetic; but she was an excellent creature, kind and good natured; and her affectations were but skin-deep.

   1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XLVII, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC

   Antonyms: bone-deep