#os id

Taking their name from a tony area of Seoul packed with doctors' offices, Gangnam beauties are people who use obvious plastic surgery to change how they look. So what happens when a girl who's felt ugly for her whole life becomes a Gangnam beauty, getting a gorgeous new face through plastic surgery? In this sweet, big-hearted drama, Kang Mi Rae learns that it was her interior that needed fixing all along.

I came into the show with little interest in seeing a story about someone superficial enough to get plastic surgery, but I left it with a new appreciation of what it means to be a woman in world that's focused on appearances. With its cast of sympathetically drawn college kids, strong production values, and slice-of-life storytelling, Gangnam Beauty ended up being one of my favorite dramas in recent memory. It avoids almost all of the pratfalls that similar kdramas usually fall into--here, you're safe from fat suits and girlie makeovers. Instead, its characters struggle with themselves but ultimately get to be who they want to be, whether that's a little chunky, a little androgynous, or a even little surgically altered.

In this drama, good looks have different values for boys and girls. As a boy, you're either model hot or you're not--you're Kyung Seok or you're pretty much anybody else. And if you're not Kyung Seok, the next best thing is to have the kind coolness that comes with walking in the rain without an umbrella or wearing an expensive shirt.

But it's not so simple for girls. As Mi Rae showed us, girls can fall anywhere on the hotness scale from 1 to 100. Biology has an impact on their score, but even more important is effort. No matter where you might naturally fall, makeup, light plastic surgery, and dieting will raise your score.

But almost as bad as not being pretty is obviously trying to be pretty. Mi Rae with her new face and Soo Ah with her eating disorder are victims of two things: the perceived need for women to be good looking, and the society that gives women tools to change their bodies but judges women for using them.

As a Western viewer, it can be risky to watch Kdramas that focus on physical appearances. Rage is a not unlikely response. (Shin Min Ah in a fat suit, amirite?) 

But this show did something right that Netflix’s Sierra Burgess Is a Loser recently screwed up in a massive way. Instead of using the suffering of its main character to excuse her bad behavior, My ID Is Gangnam Beauty called out Mi Rae for acting ugly on the inside. She had translated a lifetime of feeling bad about herself into a constant critique of the girls around her. Using an involved scoring system, she placed every woman she met on a numerical scale of beauty—sometimes enviously, sometimes ruefully. 

I might have expected this to continue throughout the show, based on my previous experience with Korean dramas. But within the first handful of episodes, Kyung Suk pointed out that Mi Rae’s grading system was no way to treat people, and Mi Rae decided she agreed with him. She hasn’t quite shaken the habit, but she’s realized that automatically ranking someone based on their looks rather than getting to know them as a person is a disservice to all involved. She even tried to apologize for her behavior.

One of this show's neatest tricks is making the viewer confront their own prejudices. Soo Ah just explained my exact trajectory when it comes to Mi Rae's plastic surgery: "Do they want to be prettier that badly? Isn't it just vanity? But I understand now... That some people are really desperate. That some appearances are painful to have."

In some ways, Soo Ah is a classic type of Kdrama character. She exists to sow chaos in other people's plotlines, sprinkling them with miscommunication and nurturing conflicting drives. Once upon a time, she would have been a spoiled heiress or pushy mother in law. But today's version of this character has a new kind of power that's independent of money and rank: beauty.

Soo Ah uses her good looks as a tool. With them, she turns the men around her into willing servants who give her whatever she wants--jobs, attention, support. And because of her pretty face, the girls around Soo Ah assume that she's innocent and trustworthy, even as she actively works against them.

I'm not crazy about this aspect of Soo Ah's character, as it plays into a lot of long-established prejudices about women. She's a femme fatale, a tease who lets men think she might want them so she can exert power over them. But to the show's credit, she also has her own problems. Her face hasn't lifted her from relative poverty, and based on the product placement we just saw for diet pills, her good looks aren't without a price.

To Soo Ah, Kyung Seok is like kryptonite. He grew up with a beautiful mother who broke his heart, and his own pretty face makes him aware of the tricks of her trade. He won't be swayed by the batting of her eyelashes because he knows full well that how things look on the outside doesn't necessarily match how they are on the inside. That's what he likes about Mi Rae--he can see through her exterior to the quality of her soul.