RichThesaurus
blow up in one's face
vs
fall on one's face
blow up in one's face
verb
To fail disastrously.
fall on one's face
verb
To fail, especially in a dramatic or particularly decisive manner.
How often have the words
blow up in one's face
and
fall on one's face
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)