Review of True Beauty / 여신강림

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

This blog post today, which is focused on True Beauty, is a part of a series I’ve been working on here. While I do watch a ton of new content in general, in order to stay on top of the trends and everything keep the world spinning entertainment wise, I also have been trying to revisit all of my old reviews, which exist before this site, and revisiting the movies and shows that existed before the site came to be.

A lot of these are Korean dramas where I scribbled notes here and there, so it’s been fun to compare my new notes to my old ones, especially when it comes to tracking how exactly my opinions and thoughts have changed throughout the years. It’s also interesting to see how tastes have changed, as many of these shows came out almost 5+ years ago.

As mentioned before, today’s post is dedicated to True Beauty, so let’s get into the review! There’s a lot of ground to cover.

A young teenager finds herself feeling beautiful through makeup, but lands inside of a love triangle.

While some might find themselves comparing this show to Cha Eun-woo’s other drama My ID is Gangnam Beauty, there is something distinct about this show: it takes place at a high school, rather than a college, so there’s no plastic surgery directly involved. Instead, our main character finds herself feeling better about her looks through makeup.

Her name is Lim Ju-kyung, and at the start of the series, we see how she has always been down on her appearance. Everyone around her seems to be discouraging because of her looks, and her classmates have been specifically bullying her because of the way she looks.

This creates a complex within Ju-kyung, who sees herself as not worthy of love and attention because of it, and she wants to change the way she looks. She decides to pick up makeup as a new skill, and after some practice and dedication to learning the skills needed for it, she masters the art of it and looks like a completely different person.

She also starts at a new school, where people don’t know what she looks like, and they see her as a goddess because of her appearance. However, there’s someone from her old school: Lee Su-ho. Once, when she tried to commit suicide on the roof of her school building, he stopped her from jumping at the last minute.

Neither of them recognize each other when they start at this new school, and despite his cold attitude and personality, she befriends him and Han Seo-jun. Seo-jun is such a rebel at the school and likes to cause problems, but one day, when she’s walking home from her favorite comic store, Su-ho sees her without makeup and realizes the connection between her current and past looks.

Slowly but surely, he starts to thaw out and have feelings for her, but then we see Seo-jun also coming to realize he has feelings for Ju-kyung too. As all of this happens, it’s only a matter of time before other people are going to see what Ju-kyung actually looks like, causing even more problems to happen at her new school even now.

Overall Thoughts

My ID is Gangnam Beauty is another show that we’re going to be getting to in the upcoming reviews, but revisiting these two shows after so much time is a trip. I have very complicated feelings about these shows because of how the main characters are treated so harshly because of their looks.

As someone who’s lived and studied in Korea, I get that this down happen, but I still feel quite sad about it because in some ways these shows romanticize it, even though there are very clear documented struggles that come with it too. I get it. I really do. It just makes me feel like we need a change.

Regardless, the standout here for me was the actor playing Seo-jun. Eun-woo is a pretty face, but I find his acting to be quite methodical, and he tends to play the same character over and over again. The female lead was fine, but I found her character to be less memorable than Seo-jun.

I think you should watch this if you haven’t already and are interested! I think it’s a solid drama, even though it does have its problems here and there.

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