Fernanda del Carpio and Remedios the Beauty serve as foils to each other throughout the novel. Both are members of the fourth generation of the Buendía family, and both are exceedingly beautiful. Though the two women both serve as queens of the same festival before disaster strikes, their personalities are starkly contrasting. Some of these differences are underscored in a passage that describes Remedios the Beauty's response to the influx of American visitors to Macondo: 

Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague. She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities. She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home. 

Fernanda del Carpio was raised in a highly traditional household, and as a result her manners are prim and proper. Despite the heat, she wears heavy and conservative clothing and treats her new family with rigid formality. In contrast, Remedios the Beauty is unaffected by social customs and pressures, acting in a highly natural manner and eschewing all "corsets and petticoats." These two beautiful but very different women are presented by the novel as foils to each other.