Mi-rae tells Kyung-seok she never gave him permission to touch her. Their Teacher’s Assistant (Kwak Dong-Yeon) stops him and tells him that while he may think what he’s doing is chivalrous, it is a form of violence.īut wait… It gets even better. She’s drunk and he thinks he’s doing the right thing by yanking at her arm to drag her back to her apartment (aka the Korean Arm Grab, which I despise).
#MY ID IS GANGNAM BEAUTY SUMMARY SERIES#
My absolute favorite part of this series was when Mi-rae’s love interest, Kyung-seok (portrayed by Astro singer Cha Eun-woo), tries to become her knight in shining armor and escort her home. These boys feel entitled to say things about the girls’ faces and bodies - no matter how cruel and inappropriate - just because they are male. Is she really a nice, but misunderstood person? Or is she a sociopath?Ī couple of the girls point out how unfair it is for the boys - most of whom are not very attractive - to judge women on their looks, rather than trying to improve their own selves. And in her world, better means prettier and more popular. But it’s also clear that she’s a Grade A manipulator who doesn’t want anyone’s life to be better than hers. Regarded as the most beautiful girl on campus, she pretends that she’s not pretty and enjoys the attention of all the boys who want to date her. Mi-rae’s frenemy is a petite fellow freshman named Soo-A, who immediately latches onto her. It’s better to be content and alone, than to settle for being someone’s second best. It’s a fact that we all grow older and that even the most beautiful man and woman will lose their looks one day. But while certain beauty standards seem to be universal, beauty is and should be subjective and in the eyes of the beholder. (FWIW, I have no idea who has or hasn’t had plastic surgery and I don’t care.) To say that about a child is reprehensible. When soccer star Ahn Jung-hwan - who was good looking enough to be a model - and his wife, former Miss Korea Lee Hye-won, had their first daughter, some netizens cruelly said that the little girl was “ugly,” because she hadn’t had her face fixed yet like her mother.
They didn’t want to get “tricked” into marrying a supposedly naturally beautiful woman who would give birth to an “ugly” child. While that’s obviously not true, it was enough of an issue that when some men and women met for blind dates, their potential partners demanded to see baby and childhood photos. People like to point out how everyone in South Korea gets plastic surgery. But without knowing her value as a human being - which has nothing to do with the shape of ones eye’s or having a small face – she is still a mess. Yes, she may still have opted to get work done on her face. What Mi-rae needed more than plastic surgery was sessions with a therapist. But as beautiful as she has become, she doesn’t see herself as attractive.Īnd therein lies the real issue that I wish had been addressed more. Shortly before she enters her freshman year of college, Mi-rae has her face re-done to the point where she is unrecognizable to her own father. Her one childhood friend, Hyun-jung (Min Do-hee), got into so many fights at school defending Mi-rae, that the latter told her friend not to hang out with her at school. But her reputation as being ugly - and therefore unworthy - carried over to middle school and high school. Once an ugly, overweight little girl who was bullied in school and derisively nicknamed, “The Hulk,” she managed to lose weight and become very thin. Here, Mi-rae (Im Soo-hyang) is that beauty. The term “Gangnam Beauty” refers to an attractive person who looks like they had cosmetic surgery.
Still, it held my interest, thanks to likable leads and some things I hadn’t seen before in K-Dramas. There was too much redundancy and padding to fill out the 16 episodes. With some taut editing and fewer episodes, this Korean series would’ve been more interesting. “My ID is Gangnam Beauty” specifically tackles South Korea’s obsession with physical looks, but the storyline carries over to many cultures, where the standards for beauty - especially for girls and women - are unrealistic. ↑ Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.