This line is used to describe someone, almost always a woman, who has serious competence and ambition in the world of work alongside a figure or manner that reads as sexually appealing. It is usually said admiringly, sometimes self-mockingly, as a way of refusing the old idea that brains and glamour cannot coexist in the same person. The “business” here is the straightforward commercial sense of the word, sharp dealing and ambition, not any euphemistic sense of the word. The phrase has a neat balance to it, pairing a practical virtue with a playful vice, and that symmetry is part of why it has stuck as a quotable one-liner.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘a head for business and a body for sin’?
The line comes from the 1988 film Working Girl, directed by Mike Nichols from a screenplay written by Kevin Wade, and is spoken by the character Tess McGill, played by Melanie Griffith. Wade, as the film’s credited screenwriter, is the writer behind the script the line appears in, though no account of the film’s making singles out the authorship of this particular sentence. As Tess speaks it, the wording is “I have a head for business and a bod for sin”, with “bod” rather than “body”, a bit of era-appropriate slang shorthand, though the phrase has since circulated in the fuller form “a head for business and a body for sin.”
The line chimes with one of the film’s running themes, the refusal to accept that a woman cannot be both taken seriously professionally and visibly glamorous.
Since the film, the phrase has taken on a life beyond it, turning up as a standalone quotable line rather than something only associated with the original scene. The novelist Jenny Colgan borrowed and adapted it in Meet Me at the Cupcake Café, writing “I have a head for business and a body for sin. Unfortunately, the sin appears to be gluttony,” a joke that depends on readers already recognising the original line well enough to enjoy the twist on it. That kind of reuse, playing against expectation rather than simply repeating the phrase, shows how firmly it had become part of everyday quotable speech.