There are microphones that will cause distorion at certain frequencies, before the actual clipping point for a wideband signal.
If the mic's response is not flat, any "bump" will clip before the other frequencies will. This is very common on LDC's with "presence peaks", those will clip first.
Same applies to mic preamps, many designs will show rising THD with either levels or frequency. I found it best to have a THD curve that is flat 20~20k hz and no rise in distortion products until full clipping is reached. Keep in mind this is not fashionable with audio designers at this time. THD is "in".
Even so, clipping also has differences. Most all transistor gear will show "hard clipping", a square wave. That is very noticable in recordings. Some advanced designs will do what I call "extended amplitude bending", the curves won't hard clip across but bend upwards, a rounded overload curve instead of a flat line across the top of the waveform. It looks more like tube distortion and it is also heavy on the pleasant sounding even harmonics vs the hard sounding odd harmonics of typical transistor clipping. I'm able to get that response using transconductance amplifier technology, but that's not normally found in pro audio.
Best to know the limitations of the gear you select. Use mics with an excess of operational headroom along with linear preamps and always be conservative with levels with 24 bit recordings.