SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

My ID is Gangnam Beauty
(내 아이디는 강남미인 / Nae Aidineun Gangnam Miin)
MyDramaList rating: 8.5/10

You can see how eager I was to watch this – it’s only been a week since my last review. This drama refuelled my love for Asian dramas after it stagnated a bit ever since I started watching Love’s Lies – again, I will probably finish it one day, but I’ll really have to get back in the mood for it. Until then, you’ll have to bear with me as I plunge once more into my favorite drama genre (after all) – romantic comedies.

First of all, I need to make a rectification. People who may have read my reviews in chronological order may remember I once wrote that I was not planning on watching this series because I’m really sceptical about the Korean society’s perspective about beauty standards and that women are encouraged to undergo plastic surgery if they’re not ‘pretty enough’.
However, right after my trip to Korea last January (at the airport waiting to board, actually), I was suddenly taken by a curiosity and decided that I’d still give it a chance. I watched the first episode on my phone while waiting at my Gate, and my interest was piqued after that. I decided to put it on my list after the one I was supposed to watch next (Love’s Lies).
I am SO happy I gave it a chance.

The series starts with Kang Mi Rae (played by Im Soo Hyang) and her mother, on their way to a plastic surgery clinic. During the process of this journey and Mi Rae’s surgery, we see flashes of her childhood. We see that she was always severely bullied because of her looks, first for being large in size, after losing weight for her face (her classmates even called her an ‘orc’). Because of this, Mi Rae became incredibly insecure and self-conscious about how other people looked at her and at one point she even made up her mind to jump off a bridge (but fortunately she was stopped). We get to know her in essence within the first episode. We see that her mother supports her the whole way and we see her go to college with her new face and the support of her best friend and roommate Oh Hyun Jung (played by Min Do Hee).
However, her new face has not cured her insecurity about herself. She is still looking around for girls who are prettier than her, she is still rating other girls’ faces to see if they are naturally pretty or not. This has become a bit of an obsession because of what she went through.
On her first day of college, she meets a bunch of new classmates, including Hyun Soo Ah (played by Jo Woo Ri), a 100% natural beauty that’s instantly the most popular girl in her year. Mi Rae admires her but is also a bit intimidated by her. She also meets Do Kyung Seok (played by Cha Eun Woo), who also went to her middle school. Although she brushes away the thought that he would even remember let alone recognize her, he does.
College life opens a whole new world of people with judgments and gossip that Mi Rae will have to get used to. There will be people that like her for being pretty, and there will be people that judge her for being ‘unnaturally’ pretty. She will need to start a new life within this society that holds the highest beauty standards. She might not be bullied anymore for being ugly, but she does immediately get the nickname ‘Gangnam Beauty’, a term used for girls that have had an obvious amount of plastic surgery done to them…

To elaborate a little about my initial hesitation to watch this drama: my first impression of this series – that is, the short parts I saw of the acting and what I’d read/seen about the story – was that it was indeed about this society of beauty standards that almost forces people to get plastic surgery as a life necessity. Mi Rae also seemed to constantly be super anxious and angsty which gave me doubts about whether I liked the actors’ acting and all that. I would officially like to apologize for judging it based on that.
After finishing it, I have to say I really liked Mi Rae’s character and she didn’t annoy me even once. I will say a bit more when I go on about the characters and the actors one by one.

I would really like to compliment the writers for doing such an amazing job on the topics and the dialogues in this series. What I liked most was the addressing of the issue on beauty standards in Korean society. Not only were these standards shown, they were criticized as well, mainly by women. There was great diversity in the cast of characters, people that went along with the standards as well as people that rebelled against them.
It put the whole notion of plastic surgery into perspective and showed that we shouldn’t judge people on their faces no matter what. The ‘plastic surgery monster’ may still be less of a monster than the most natural beauty. We shouldn’t get involved in other people’s business. What is it to us when two people are happy and dating? Who are we to judge whether they look good together or not?
This is legit one of the better dramas I’ve seen in a long time. I genuinely enjoyed it. There is so much to say about it, I just hope I can note everything down in a coherent order.

Continuing with the notion of the main theme, the concept of the beauty standards, I would like to point out that I found it interesting how the three main characters of the series all embodied a different attitude towards it.
First we have Mi Rae, who has experienced first-hand what it’s like to be on the dark side and found herself not being able to cope with it – she decided to blend in by undergoing plastic surgery to at least erase a part of her social self-consciousness and allow her to at least experience a little more comfort in living her daily life.
Secondly we have Kyung Seok, who has always been handsome, but doesn’t give a shit. He has never cared about outward appearances, let alone what others may or may not think about it.
And thirdly we have Soo Ah, who despite her natural beauty has become obsessed with attention and what other people think about her and is even using her prejudice to bring other people down. She is actually more scarred than Mi Rae.
Soo Ah can be classified as ‘the bitch’ in this drama, but I think her character is very mysterious. I, for one, still do not completely understand her motives even after finishing the series. However, that doesn’t take away that I too have been cussing her out as the bitch throughout the whole series – her approach just took a very wrong turn and there’s no making up for that.

The main story is about Mi Rae coming to terms with herself – learning to love herself for who she is and stop caring about what other people think of her when she realizes those opinions stop her from following her heart.
It’s about the romantic development between her and Kyung Seok, naturally, but also about a lot of other people who, in their own way, struggle to find their place in their community without being judged by outward elements.
We learn about Mi Rae’s and Kyung Seok’s families, how they each handle opinions from the outside and find out that family is more important than reputation. We learn how far people can go in their prejudice that some people deserve things that others don’t.
The most important lesson to be learned from this drama, I think, is to ultimately let go of your obsession with other people’s view on you. To accept who you are and learn how unimportant other people’s judgements of you are. To focus on what you love and not let anyone get in the way of that. To love yourself for who you are and not be effected by anyone else.
I think I’ve paraphrased it enough times now, haha.

Let me start with Mi Rae’s circle. Mi Rae is a single child. We see in the beginning that her mother (played by Kim Sun Hwa) fully supports her in her decision to get her whole face done. However, we find out that her father (played by Woo Hyun) doesn’t know about this and he is initially very angry with her. As for all parents, he has always found his daughter beautiful and he is shocked by the discovery that he now has to get used to a completely different face. He even denies he knows her in the beginning, but he comes around in the end.
Kyung Seok is the oldest child and only son of Do Sang Won (played by Park Sung Geun), a congressman running for mayor. His mother left him and his younger sister Kyung Hee (Kim Ji Min) when he was still very young. Their father has always told them she ran off with another man and since he is now busy with the elections, he doesn’t spend time with his children and just has people watching them to make sure they don’t obstruct him in his quest to become mayor.
Na Hye Sung (Park Joo Mi), Kyung Seok’s mother, has regretted her decision to leave her children behind after escaping from her husband all those years ago. She is the CEO of Kelun, a major perfume producing company, despite the fact that she is barely able to smell or taste anything anymore herself (thanks to a violent outburst of her husband in the past).
She becomes a role model for Mi Rae, who is very interested in entering the perfume industry. She is also the lady who saved Mi Rae’s life in middle school by stopping her from jumping off a bridge.
She remains a major source of support for Mi Rae throughout the series and eventually also wins back the trust and love of her children after they find out their father has been lying to them.
In the end, Kyung Seok’s father loses the election by an inch because at just the wrong moment, news breaks out that Kyung Hee has been doing livestream videos on the Internet showing off her luxurious lifestyle while all he preaches is to be a mayor for the ‘normal’ people. When everything falls apart, he realizes that his family is more important and apologizes to his ex-wife – after which she exits like a badass.
We find out that Soo Ah has been abandoned by her parents when she was in elementary school. She used to be bullied for being dirty and looking like a rag because she couldn’t take care of herself. When one time her mother appears and washes her and feeds before leaving again, she decides to hold her own and when she cleans up, she finds out the people around her find her really pretty.
Soo Ah became obsessed with rules of how to act and how to behave so that people might like her, otherwise she would return to how she used to be.
For some reason, she continues this behavior by ensuring that everyone’s attention (and especially the guys’) is constantly on her and that no one takes the spotlight away from her. As soon as someone is looking at someone else than her, she needs to get that person’s attention back on her no matter what, even if that hurts everyone around her. It seems like she doesn’t have the capacity to truly care about other people and that she’s just leading on and playing with every guy that shows interest in her. Even though it seems like she’s interested in Kyung Seok from the start, in the end she admits to him personally that she actually never had feelings for him. The whole series, she has lied about every single aspect of her life, even her background and the neighborhood she lives in. It has become a habitual illness for her to hide her true self in order to be liked by everyone. She even lies about going to brush her teeth while actually she’s secretly throwing up in the bathroom. In the end, she inevitably finds out she can’t be liked by everyone and it all blows up in her face when her true intentions come to light and a lot of people are hurt by her actions. I still feel like she never really reflects, she never apologizes for anything she did, and she still gets away with ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve this’. She remains very mysterious throughout the whole series, there isn’t a scene in which she bursts out and confesses the whole truth behind her mask. Which is also unique. We only get to see her fake side, in the scenes of her by herself she barely talks, so we literally don’t get to see what she’s thinking. Except for occasionally mumbling a few words to herself to indicate she’s not so nice as she seems, it never exceeds those few words. In that way, she is a very complex and fascinating character. I really want to compliment the actress for making me both hate her and wonder about her so much.

Of course, a K-Drama is never complete without a second male lead. In this case, that was Yeon Woo Young (played by Kwak Dong Yeon), the TA in Mi Rae’s chemistry class. Mi Rae enters the Chemistry Department at Hankook University in order to pursue her dream of creating perfume. She has a really good sense of smell for ingredients and has been reading up on perfumes since she was in middle school. She was inspired by Na Hye Sung’s article saying that perfume was about an inner beauty and that really spoke to her at that time. I can’t remember the exact quote, but it was really good. I hadn’t thought about perfume like that before.
Anyways, in one of their classes they have to work in a lab with actual chemicals and the TA for this class is Woo Young. His interest is piqued by Mi Rae the first time he sees her. He also lives in the same neighborhood as Mi Rae and Hyun Jung and they hang out on several occasions. Hyun Jung is kind of crushing on him, but is silently resigned once she realizes he likes Mi Rae. Honestly, Hyun Jung and Woo Young were two of the best people.
Hyun Jung’s loyalty to Mi Rae never faltered, even when her crush liked her best friend. She was always there for her, she always supported her and they shared everything. Woo Young was a precious guy as well, a genuinely good person who knew he didn’t stand a chance but still felt that his feelings mattered enough to confess them honestly. When Mi Rae rejected him, he accepted it like an adult and got over it.

I think now is a good time to go over to the many important side characters this drama has to offer. As I mentioned before, I think the cast of characters represented a lot of different types of people.
I would like to categorize the characters into two groups:
1. the social but nonetheless kind of superficial people that are part of the whole beauty standard perspective. They are the people that want to be friends only with handsome/pretty people and actively participate in gossip about others.
2. the people who in some way become a victim of this perspective and fight against stereotypes by being their unique selves no matter what other people may think of that.
Naturally, I had more sympathy for the Category 2 characters, but I still can’t completely say that I don’t see where the Category 1 people are coming from. It’s wrong what they preach, but I think they also represent the majority of society. They always find something to gossip about, someone to put down, or something to get involved in which is actually none of their business.

When we follow Mi Rae on her first day at college, we meet a lot of new people. First of all, her classmates.
Apart from Soo Ah, there is Lee Ji Hyo (played by Jung Hye Rin). Ji Hyo is Soo Ah’s friend, or at least the person always seen hanging with Soo Ah, but I think it’s safe to say she is a very clear Category 1. She is friends with Soo Ah because she is pretty and popular which also gives her some sidelight. When Soo Ah’s actions come to light, she is the first one to leave her side, being all like ‘I didn’t know she did all that!’ And she was always someone who’d start gossipping about someone. The first voice that would say ‘Don’t you think that person is really weird?’ Though she may not be a complete bitch (we mostly see her as just another person that’s fooled by Soo Ah), she does turn out to be a superficial friend who is also only interested in outward appearances and who makes the most ill-considered judgement remarks about other people.
Then there is Jang Won Ho and his friend Kim Sung Woon, the comical duo. Jang Won Ho (played by Kim Do Yeon) has had a crush on Soo Ah since the first moment he saw her and she has led him on the entire time, until she publicly confesses liking Kyung Seok. It’s only then that he’s forced to see how she’s played him all this time. Until then, no matter what she did, it was never wrong in his eyes because he liked her so much.
His friend Sung Woon (Kim Eun Soo) is there for him all the way, and a loyal friend and all, but he is and remains a gossip lover as well.
And then there are my two favorite side characters, Yoo Eun (played by Park Yoo Na) and Choi Jung Boon (Jung Seung Hye), Mi Rae’s closest friends in college. They are definitely Category 2 characters.
Eun becomes the freshmen representative and therefore spends a lot of time with the seniors. She is extremely uncomfortable with the way the guys treat all the girls and how they forbid her from saying anything just because she’s a freshman.
In the end, even though she’s been suspecting something about Soo Ah, she is the only one who sticks by her. Even though she knows that what Soo Ah is doing is not right, she chooses to worry about her and get her help rather than hate her.
Jung Boon has a dialect suggesting she’s from the countryside, and she isn’t categorized as one of the pretty girls, but she also rebels against that. She ends up helping out Kyung Seok’s friend who owns a bar, saving him from total bankruptcy as she’s really good with bookkeeping.
I liked the developing relationship between these two, Jung Boon and Yoo Jin (played by Lee Tae Sun). Yoo Jin first seemed like a bit of a Category 1 dude because he wouldn’t hire Jung Boon because she wasn’t pretty enough, but after finding out she was right and the girl he hired was stealing money, he became a puppy to her and their friendship started growing.

Going on to the seniors, we can easily put all male sunbae under Category 1. They are the alpha males that feel the need to show that they are the bigger men, the ‘oppa’ figures that the cute new young girls can come to when they’re struggling with something. They are also the guys that don’t understand when a girl says ‘no’ and will always claim that the girls provoked them.
To name them, Kim Chan Woo (played by Oh Hee Joon), Jo Jung Hyeob (Kim Lee Rin), Song Jung Ho (Choi Sung Won) and Goo Tae Young (Ryu Ki San). The last two turned out to be ‘okay’ in the end, Jung Ho realized how idiotic their behavior was and Tae Young learned a lesson from being swayed by Soo Ah.
Then we have the cool female seniors. Kim Tae Hee (played by Lee Ye Rim), Go Ye Na (Baek Soo Min) and Kwon Yoon Byul (Bae Da Bin). I feel like this trinity represented the diversity in types of girls that didn’t necessarily fall under the standard. Tae Hee was chubby (representing diversity in body types), Yoon Byul was androgynous in both appearance and behavior (representing eg. diversity in gender-biased standards in behavior) and Ye Na was just herself, no matter how many times she made a fool out of herself (trying to hit on Kyung Seok for example), she never lost her cool and she was never too shy to stand up for her friends. I liked these three a lot.

Side note: I really really liked Tae Young and Tae Hee as a couple. I didn’t understand why Soo Ah felt the need to screw up their relationship and even though I applaud Tae Hee for standing up for herself to Tae Young when he came crawling back to her, I did feel sad that they didn’t end up together. They were adorable.
(Explanation: Tae Hee and Tae Young started dating and they were adorable and then Soo Ah came to sway Tae Young into thinking that she was interested in him, resulting in him breaking up with Tae Hee.)

One more thing about Soo Ah: I mentioned in the beginning that after finishing the series, I still wasn’t sure about her motives. We see a bit of her background, how she used to not be so much different from Mi Rae, but even with that background information it doesn’t make sense to me why she would do all those things. She judged and hated Mi Rae from the beginning because she had a prejudice about plastic surgery and she thought Mi Rae didn’t deserve to be happy because she wasn’t born pretty. People should only like truly pretty people? Or something like that. She looked down on her, that’s the essence. But apart from that she also wrecked the relationship between Tae Young and Tae Hee, she led a bunch of guys on by smiling and showing fake interest and saying just that one line of text that plants a seed of doubt or hope in people’s minds. When they’d come to confront her, she would just act like she didn’t know what they were on about. That was how she acted, she would be clear enough in her words to struck a chord, but vague enough so that she could always claim she never meant it like that when she was confronted, leaving the other person wondering whether they are weird for thinking too much. She planted the seed that led Tae Young to break up with Tae Hee by saying ‘what if someone else would say they were interested in you? Would you be swayed? If you would be swayed by someone else, then that means you don’t truly like Tae Hee’. Then, when she’s got him all wrapped around her finger and he gives her a present, she’s like ‘Oh gosh, you didn’t think I was talking about myself, did you? I was just saying that as a general statement’.
In the end, she hurt a bunch of people and one guy in particular even came after her to take revenge on her. In that moment, it truly seemed like she didn’t realize how her actions had come across. She looked truly scared, as if she really had no idea that’s how she had been perceived. Which was really puzzling because up until then everything she did had seemed like a very conscious action. I still believe she knew exactly what she was doing, and that’s why her character is so unbelievable.
I am realizing as I’m typing that, while Soo Ah is the character I want to spend the least words on, I’m actually spending the most words on her.
Let’s just leave it at these last words I would like to say to her if she were a real person: you reap what you sow.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it clearly before, but returning to the point of how this series criticized beauty standards, I have to emphasize that there is a LOT of sexual objectification in this drama. It really fixates on the main perspective that outward appearance matters the most, and that only the most handsome/pretty people get all the attention and compliments. Other people are just ignored or considered ‘weird’ for not blending in with the rest.
The clearest example of this can be found amongst the seniors. When we first meet all the seniors (all of the people mentioned above), we also simultaneously meet the toxic masculinity and sexual objectification tendencies of the male seniors. They make fun of Tae Hee for being chubby, of Yoon Byul for looking androgynous, and they keep asking the pretty first year girls how it’s possible they don’t have boyfriends.
Episode 6 is a torture to watch, but at the same time incredibly empowering for the female characters. The episode of the school festival, in which Mi Rae, Soo Ah and Ji Hyo – as the three prettiest freshmen – are selected to play waitress at their pancake cafe and consequently forced to wear really short skirts. What makes the scene in which the costumes are revealed so painful is that we first see the reactions of the girls – all their faces just say NO. And then the guys enter, they start whistling and clapping and even take pictures at a ridiculously low angle without permission.
When tensions rise at the school festival itself and all three of the waitresses need to leave, the question arises as to what now. When Yoon Byul suggests the other girls take over the serving, the guys just laugh at them, saying they wouldn’t look good in the costumes. When the suggestion of the guys doing it themselves comes by, they brush it away with ‘serving should be done by girls’. What follows is a scene that I both loathe and love, namely one where each girl individually stands up to the guys about their own issue. Tae Hee criticizes them for making comments about her body, Eun questions their authority for telling her not to say anything because she’s younger than they are and she should just obey them.
It’s a very painful but ultimately wholesome scene and I was super grateful for it. Episode 6 just took care of this whole stupid gender-biased sexist issue.

As I mentioned earlier, there were two seniors who came around, but the one who remained the same until the end was Kim Chan Woo.
He is introduced in the first episode as the first person to show romantic interest in Mi Rae – during the orientation he is constantly up in her aura, flirting with her, and almost forcing her to team up with him. He asks her flat out if she would consider him as her boyfriend on the first day they meet and he almost physically forces himself unto her after getting her alone for a moment. After being rejected by her, his pride is so hurt that he almost attacks her. Even after being suspended for a while, he returns to college and continues the exact same way. He becomes the kind of person that, whenever he would appear on screen, I would go ‘oh god not him again’. I think that in the end he was the only guy who remained the same throughout the whole series. He is a good representative figure for guys that just don’t change.

Let me talk about the romance between Mi Rae and Kyung Seok. It’s been a while since I was so genuinely excited for a couple to come together.
The chemistry between them was amazing and you could just feel them getting closer bit by bit. I think they dosed their romance just enough. The build-up was just right, the push-and-pull was just right, the hesitation was just right, the confession was just right, the first hand holding and the first kiss were just right, and after that they were just such a naturally cute couple.
Kyung Seok is pretty stoic and also very new to a lot of things. When he finds out the truth about this mother, he leaves home to take care of himself, but that means he has to leave behind the luxurious household in which everything was done for him. Now he has to learn how to live, cook, shop for groceries and manage his finances all by himself. He ends up living at Woo Young’s place as his roommate and while they first don’t really see eye to eye, their bromance slowly grows. The scenes between the two of them are really fun to watch.
Kyung Seok stands up for Mi Rae from the start. He kicks Kim Chan Woo’s ass at least twice for bothering her and realizing his own anger in this situation makes him already discover his feelings for Mi Rae. While in the beginning his innocent jealousy when he sees her with Woo Young or another guy is kind of endearing, he becomes more straightforward about his feelings as time progresses. Actually, Mi Rae rejects him twice before she is finally able to become honest with herself. She rejects him not because she doesn’t like him at that point, but because she’s still too caught up in the idea of what other people might think if they start dating. By then, Soo Ah has confessed to Kyung Seok and everyone knows. If she were suddenly to start dating Kyung Seok, everyone would automatically start comparing her to Soo Ah (“who did Kyung Seok reject Soo Ah for, it must be someone even prettier than her etc.”) and this causes her a lot of stress. She rejects him twice because of her own insecurity. BUT, and this is the most important: she gets over it by herself. She gradually learns to stop caring.
One thing I really admire about Mi Rae is how she never caves in. She may be insecure but she never has difficulty with standing up for herself.
At the school festival, Soo Ah has somehow managed to get Mi Rae’s crush from middle school (one of the guys who always called her an orc) to come to the festival so that he’d bump into Mi Rae. When he calls her that nasty name again, she tells him off in a way that makes even his friends embarrassed of him.
She figures out Soo Ah’s true nature by herself, her trust in her real friends and Kyung Seok never wavers. She stays true to herself throughout the entire series and that’s really admirable. In a lot of dramas, no matter how many times the guy tells the girl he likes her, she’ll still be like ‘Ehh there’s no way he really likes me…’, but Mi Rae has no trouble getting the message in one go. Even when Soo Ah starts talking about her and Kyung Seok as if they’re dating, Mi Rae isn’t swayed because she knows Kyung Seok is not interested in Soo Ah. Things like that. It was so nice to see her confidence grow with every episode, and in the end she was the one who told everyone about their relationship. She discovered how, indeed, the opinions of other people didn’t matter to what they had going on.
And about the kissing scene(s), I actually liked the scene where they were standing on this view top cuddling and casually kissing each other more than their first kiss at Mi Rae’s parents’ house. They just looked so natural and comfortable with each other there.

Let me finally say something about the actors. I had never seen Im Soo Hyang before, but as I was watcing her I was suddenly reminded that she might be able to play a younger version of Na Young Hee. I thought their faces looked quite similar. Anyways, I really liked Im Soo Hyang’s portrayal of Kang Mi Rae. I haven’t read the webtoon that this drama was based on, but I don’t think I need to now because I have enough sympathy for her as it is. It’s made really clear where she’s coming from, where her insecurity and doubts about people come from, and still I think she opened up quite easily. The moments where she was herself made me like her even more, those were the only moments where she wasn’t concerned about how she looked to others. I do wonder how she must have felt personally when she was asked to play a Gangnam Beauty.
Cha Eun Woo – I know that he’s from the K-Pop group Astro but I hadn’t seen him in a drama before. But there is another drama on my list with him as the male lead, so I’m going to look forward to that. I think he did very well. Kyung Seok was the only one who saw through Mi Rae’s plastic surgery from the start and from the first episode on I loved him for how real he was with people. He knew Soo Ah was bad news from the get-go and he was a really good judge of character. On multiple occasions I found myself saying to my screen ‘get you a guy like that’.
I have seen Kwak Dong Yeon in several dramas before (Moonlight Drawn by Clouds, Fight for my Way, Reunited Worlds, Radio Romance), but I feel like this time he really popped out to me. I have the impression that I saw him in a lot of younger brother roles before, so it was nice to see him as a hyung-figure and a mature adult. I really liked his acting, I felt like he showed a more comical side to him as well and he had a really naturally casual feel about him.
I recognized Min Do Hee as well, searching on wiki-d.addicts I discovered she’s also in Clean with Passion for Now, where she was also the best friend to the female lead. Her character made me very happy. It’s just so nice to have an unconditionally loyal friend in the story who has your back no matter what.
When I looked up Jo Woo Ri, I found out she was also in Descendants of the Sun and she’s in two dramas that are coming up on my to-watch list as well.
Overall, I really liked the cast and there were a lot of actors that I didn’t know – good for my knowledge database of K-actors! I’m impressed.

Okay, this review took me a long time. There was so much to include, so many characters and storylines. The story in itself is quite simple: a girl getting over her insecurity. But this drama was so much more.
I can’t get over how happy I am that I gave this a chance, I truly am. I am even slightly regretting finishing it so fast because I was enjoying it so much. It was so good and wholesome.
One last general statement before I close off. I think in a way, we all have some kind of prejudice regarding plastic surgery and beauty standards. It’s a lesson for everyone to learn. I would be a liar if I said I were any different – heck, I almost didn’t watch this drama because of this prejudice.
But the most important thing, and also the most difficult thing, is to love yourself and learn how to avoid getting sucked into other people’s opinions and judgements. You are the only one who knows you. Let people say what they want, they are only seeing you from a distance. The most important people are the people closest to you, who know the real you and don’t make you feel like you should be hiding who you really are.
Love your body, love your behavior, love your foolishness, stand up for your rights and don’t be swayed by others.
If you feel that you need plastic surgery because there is some outward element of yourself that you just can’t live with, you are the only person who gets to decide whether you’re going to do it or not. People may talk about you being ‘unnatural’ or ‘desperate to be pretty’, but they don’t know the truth about your motivations. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t. As long as you do.

I will be back with another review soon! Bye-bye! ^^

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Love’s Lies
(真爱的谎言之破冰者/Zhen Ai De Huang Yan)
The Icebreaker of True Love’s Lie)
MyDramaList rating (so far) : 5.0/10

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long silence, a lot has been happening. I hope everyone is safe and healthy during this bizarre Corona situation. For some reason I’ve been switching back to Netflix and also downloaded Disney+ so I had some difficulty getting back into an Asian drama, certainly such a lengthy one as Love’s Lies.

Since it is taking me a lot of time to watch this, let alone finish it, so I have decided to split it into two halves. I will finish part 1 first, then watch something else in between, and then get back to the second half when I’m in the mood again. It’s just too lengthy for me to watch in one go without getting impatient to watch the rest of my to-watch list at this moment.

If I remember correctly, I put this drama on my list after seeing a trailer of it which looked really cool and intense. I’ve seen a couple of really good Chinese series in the past and it looked like this might be worth my while, even though I’m normally not one for the ‘drug case police crime’ genre.
But I watched some genre that wasn’t really in my alley before and it still turned out to be very thrilling, so I think I decided to put it on my list to give it a try, remembering in the back of my mind When a Snail Falls in Love. I really liked that one.
Next thing I know, my list becomes longer and longer and as this one approaches I start wondering, why did I put this on my list? What is this? I watched the trailer again and I was like Oof… not sure if I’m going to like it, but I guess I’ll give it a try. So here I am. Halfway through it. After almost a month.

For the practical information: Love’s Lies has 44 episodes. Now most Chinese dramas are quite lengthy, so that in itself doesn’t have to a problem as long as it remains interesting. Secondly, each episode is about 45 minutes long. And there’s so much drama and so much happening in every episode that I can almost never get myself to watch more than 1 episode a day.
It’s like when I was watching Valid Love, but maybe not exactly as emotionally draining. It’s just not really grabbing my full serious attention as of yet, that’s why I can’t focus that well and it feels like ages to finish it.

Anyways, as I said I will write this review in two parts. I will first write up until episode 22 where I’m at right now, and add part 2 after some time when I feel like I can continue. I stopped at quite a cliffhanger point, but it’s an alright point to take a break.

Love’s Lies starts off in Beijing. Tan Dou Dou (played by Pan Zhi Lin) and Jin Yuan (played by Luo Jin) used to be a great couple until Jin Yuan disappeared on their wedding day and stood Dou Dou up at the altar. She then hears nothing from him for seven years.
We then switch to the present, where Dou Dou arrives at work and a strange package is delivered to her at her office – a package with Jin Yuan as the sender. As she’s opening it, the police storm in and compromise the package. It contains a teddybear and, after some more thorough searching, it turns out that the teddybear contains a whole pack of crystal meth.
Dou Dou, unaware of anything that’s happening, is taken in by the police for questioning about Jin Yuan, even though she doesn’t know anything about what happened to him since he disappeared on her without saying a word.
She escapes the police and makes her way to Haibin, followed by one police officer called Qiao Liang (played by Cao Zheng). She follows the address on the package to trace Jin Yuan in Haibin and then finds out he is involved in some major drug trafficking case. In an attempt to single-handedly catch him in the act, she gets herself involved with both the Haibin police and Jin Yuan’s secretive mission, which remains unclear. When they reunite, however, there seems to still be a spark between them and it’s clear that something serious made Jin Yuan disappear all those years ago, because he still loves Dou Dou and does everything to not keep her involved.
After working together with the police to clear Jin Yuan’s name (since he wasn’t the one who sent the package to Dou Dou), Dou Dou gets into even more trouble when she finds out Jin Yuan is also under the command of Cai Bing Kun (played by Zhang Chen Guang), a major drug maffia boss. It turns out that ‘Uncle Kun’ had the package delivered to Dou Dou to get her involved so she and Jin Yuan could be together again – or so that he can keep her hostage to make sure Jin Yuan keeps following his orders.
Useful leverage, as Jin Yuan ALSO happens to be a spy for the Haibin police who are working on a plan to capture Cai Bing Kun’s gang for seven years now. The last part of the first half of the series consists mainly of Jin Yuan not trying to get caught in his work as a double spy and Dou Dou trying to think of ways they can both escape.

So far, they have managed to drag the whole story on for a long, long time. Not even that much has actually happened. What makes it feel so long is partly because of very long scenes with long dialogues. I swear, every scene has a long dialogue which goes on and on and on. I really feel like this is one thing that makes every episode feel so lenghty.
My prior experience with Chinese dramas is that they always try to incorporate as many stories/storylines/characters backgrounds into one series, even side characters’ that the viewer doesn’t find as interesting as the more important characters. I had this problem before with Meteor Garden 2018, they went way too deep into some past romance story of one of the F4 members that really didn’t peak my interest at all.
Now in Love’s Lies, there are a lot of stories besides Jin Yuan and Dou Dou’s.
To explain them all will take a lot of time, so I will go step-by-step.

On the one hand, we now have the story that happens within Cai Bing Kun’s gang. Dou Dou is kept hostage on the island where they reside, far away from the city and only reachable with one boat. Jin Yuan occasionally has to go back to the mainland to help with drug trafficking cases (and unknown to Uncle Kun, to meet up with the police lieutenant he’s spying for).
On the other hand, there is the story of Qiao Liang and the Haibin police force. They are still trying to figure out where Uncle Kun is hiding, and where Dou Dou went (they suspect Jin Yuan of kidnapping her). Besides the police lieutenant and the captain (I think?) no one in the police force knows that Jin Yuan is actually a double spy helping them to bring Uncle Kun down from the inside.
Qiao Liang has unknowingly almost ruined several cases in which he might have found out about Jin Yuan’s involvement with the police, all because he is a bit reckless and jumps at every opportunity to catch Uncle Kun. In the meantime, Qiao Liang is also getting sort of romantically involved with this captain’s daughter and has asked the captain if he could become his apprentice. The police captain, Captain Huang (played by Wang Yan Hui) has only his daughter Xin Yue (played by Lu Xing Chen) and doesn’t want her to marry a police officer because he lost his own wife because of his occupation and finds it too dangerous if she were to get involved in anything.
Anyways, so Jin Yuan is basically the chain that binds the two sides of the story together. He’s the only link between the police and Uncle Kun. However, he is being pressured a lot from both sides. The police is basically forcing him to stay there to finish the mission they have been working on for seven years. Uncle Kun is getting more suspicious about him by the minute (since he’s caught a rumor of there being a mole in their midst) and is forcing him to prove his loyalty to him more intensely than ever. Jin Yuan has by now already been forced to murder one of Uncle Kun’s closest associates because he couldn’t let himself be suspected and this particular guy was getting too close to the truth. He is fooling the maffia, putting his life at risk every single day. It’s a lot of pressure. And then there’s Dou Dou, who’s also not making things easier for him. She keeps getting in the way of his plans, thinking she needs to stand up for him and help him but all she does is get ing herself even more unnecessarily involved. She has already tried reaching the police and escape from the island, openly threatening to report everything to the police, getting Uncle Kun more agitated and angry as time goes by. And of course it all comes down to Jin Yuan to keep his woman in tow.
Because – Oh I forgot to mention this – Dou Dou was forced into marrying Jin Yuan on the island. If she didn’t become ‘one of them’, Uncle Kun would’ve been forced to kill her because she was a liability. So, they are actually married now. And while Dou Dou is all too happy acting like a lovey-dovey couple, Jin Yuan is scared as hell for her. He refuses to pretend he loves her when they’re alone, only in front of Uncle Kun does he openly speak of how much he loves her.

So, part 1 ends after Jin Yuan and Dou Dou decide to go back to the island (after actually successfully escaping it) and need to prove more than ever to Uncle Kun what they have been up to. At this time, Uncle Kun is more suspicious of Jin Yuan than ever.
At the same time it has been revealed that Uncle Kun also has a spy within the police force, one who has already reported at least one case of Dou Dou’s plan to report something to the police. His face hasn’t been revealed yet, but it looks a lot like it’s Captain Huang. Which, if true, would pose a new reason for him to reject Qiao Liang’s relationship with his daughter – he doesn’t want anyone to get involved in any way.

I think Luo Jin, who plays Jin Yuan, is the best actor in the whole series. His character is so incredibly layered and conflicted. He has so much backstory and everything makes it so hard for him to choose for his own happiness.
He grew up with a drug dealer as a father, saw him get in trouble with gangsters all the time. He lost his entire family to the drug dealing business that Cai Bing Kun took over, and for seven years he has been working secretly with the police to avenge his mother and brother. The reason why he disappeared from Dou Dou’s side also has to do with that he was summoned by the police when his father died or something. Anyways, he chose not to tell her anything because she didn’t know about his family history to begin with and decided to keep her safe by disappearing.
And now, at this stage, we start to see how hard it has been on him. We see how much he cares for Dou Dou and how he is literally not letting himself admit to it. The way he looks at Dou Dou is just so heartwrenching, he is so conflicted. He is in way too deep to stop now, his head is telling him to finish the mission, even though the lieutenant gave him a chance to walk away.
He’s the kind of guy who would sacrifice himself for anyone he holds dear, he just wants to do things his own way as long as he can keep Dou Dou safe.

And then there’s Dou Dou. Honestly I find her very annoying. She is very impulsive and naive at the same time. She is gutsy at the wrong moments, causing her to make the tensions even worse. It honestly seems as if she’s still not completely aware of how much danger she is in. And she does things… that are just plain stupid. For example, when she is locked inside the house at the island, the first thing she does is run to the phone to call the police. As if she can seriously just call the police from a maffia prison.
Also, her regular attempts to run away. She is like a little child sometimes. Whenever she thinks no-one’s looking, she thinks she can just sneak away. Girl, there’s armed guards spread over the entire island. I was actually really surprised when she actually managed to get off so easily that one time. But it also happened in a stupid way. She was literally on the boat, the guy was just peddling her around because she needed to clear her mind after Jin Yuan had to shoot that one guy. And then she came back and she saw those guys looking for her and then suddenly she was like ‘Oh welp, I can actually use this boat to leave!’ Like, girl. You were on the boat for an hour and the thought to sneak away didn’t occur to you earlier?!
I don’t know, she’s just a little too hysterical for me. And she cries a lot. Of course, in the situation she’s in, she can’t be happy. But it just feels like she’s trying to bluff her way out of something she doesn’t even fully understand yet. After they get forcefully married, she puts on this whole ‘I’m going to be a good wife!’ attitude and starts bringing Jin Yuan lunch at his office and stuff like that, and Jin Yuan is just like ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing, we got married so I can protect you and it wasn’t so that you could flaunt it and shout it out to the world because it’s freaking suspicious we got married overnight’. It’s like she keeps getting herself more and more involved while she should trust in Jin Yuan. Because of her radical behavior, she now passed three streaks with Uncle Kun and she is risking her life for nothing.

I’m confused as to why, even in this situation where they’ve each seen what the other has become in seven years and are in the same boat, Jin Yuan is still pretending and not telling Dou Dou the truth about what happened. I mean, he did tell her by now but it took a long time. He just kept her guessing and that’s why she has so many conflicting and mixed ideas about him. She doesn’t know for sure he is working with the police, she’s suspecting it but he won’t confirm it. She had the chance to run away and let Jin Yuan return to the island by himself, but she didn’t. It was an emotionally logical choice, because of course she loves him too much to be able to let him go back by himself and he will probably get himself killed. On the other side, I think it would’ve been better for her to disappear. She shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in this from the beginning. She quite fairly has nothing to do with any of it, except being Jin Yuan’s ex. But even when they were together she didn’t know about his secrets, so she really has nothing to do with any of the things she has now gotten herself involved with. And she keeps doing it. She keeps calling their bluff and she keeps getting herself into more danger. That’s what I find really dumb.

Dou Dou also had some contact with Qiao Liang, even though she didn’t know it was him. When he was chasing her on the train from Beijing to Haibin in the first episode, he secretly added himself to her WeChat under the alias of ‘Black Cat Detective’ and has gained her trust insofar that she sometimes sends him messages. Which is also weird, because she doesn’t even know who Black Cat Detective is and she still sends messages about her being in danger. And when she does, she sends some really poetic ambiguous stuff like ‘There is plane that will go down and I can’t stop it’. Like, how the heck is someone who doesn’t know what situation she is in understand what she means by that? If she wants help from someone outside of this whole thing, it doesn’t help to speak in code.
So Qiao Liang usually can’t make a lot out of her messages and always ends up asking his fellow officers for advice. And then he’ll be like ‘OH. The plane is a metaphor for Jin Yuan! Jin Yuan is about to do something and she can’t stop him!’ And then what. He still can’t do anything about it because he doesn’t have any proof of what Jin Yuan is doing.

I honestly don’t think Qiao Liang is a great police detective. He is super reckless and instinctive, but he lets himself get carried away and doesn’t think about the consequences to his actions. He’s the kind of guy who will just go after the culprit when he happens to see him without calling for backup. The ‘I got this!’ kind of a guy who really doesn’t ‘got it’.
Also, he’s not really smart. As in, as a detective I always reckon they see things others don’t see and they can see through coded messages and have some kind of nose for trouble. But seriously, he has had several on-point clues that he’s just let go because some people from Uncle Kun’s side tried to put him on the wrong trail. And then he’s just like, ‘Oh, guess I was wrong, bummer’. I mean, DUDE. He located the freaking island. He SAW Uncle Kun with his own eyes. There was a wedding on the island, the next morning when he sees Dou Dou she’s ‘suddenly’ married after disappearing for an entire day. He keeps waiting for messages from people after they disappear, too. Dou Dou has gone missing like 5 times and all he does is wait until he hears from her, wait until she finally picks up the phone. And then all she tells him is some lie about how she’s fine and there’s nothing wrong and he just lets it slide.
Honestly, all these really serious situations are happening and the police are just having promotion parties. They sit around the table to talk about ‘hm, we still don’t know where Uncle Kun is hiding’, and they’re literally not doing anything. The lieutenant is of course keeping some things under wraps, but it seems like Jin Yuan is the only one doing all the work for the police. He slips some hints to them every once in a while, like: keep an eye on this drug trafficking event. That’s it.
I also don’t understand where Qiao Liang is going with Xin Yue. He was all about making an impression on her at first, and they’ve worked together and she even helped in some cases, and now that she’s finally responding to his advances, he suddenly starts acting all casual like ‘Xin Yue? What about her?’ and acting like he’s too cool for school. I don’t really get him.

A point of criticism on the acting part: the guy that Jin Yuan had to shoot to gain Uncle Kun’s trust – Du Da Hai? – he really got on my nerves. His acting was really bad. He had this super bad guy face, bald and scarred and crooked teeth and everything, he was supposed to be Uncle Kun’s most loyal and most dangerous ally – but he was basically the Captain Obvious of the whole scene. He overacted everything, he named everything that was already obvious without mentioning. I guess it was his role definition to be a total badass except when in front of Uncle Kun. But he was literally the guy who verbally mentioned everything that was already clear.
He was the guy who, during the countless dinner scenes at the island house, would whisper to his neighbor ‘I wonder what is going on?’
In one scene, Uncle Kun called him and a few other guys to come out for a moment, as if there was something happening, but it was just to leave Dou Dou and Jin Yuan’s other trusted friend alone to listen in on their conversation, hoping they would reveal some information about Jin Yuan’s true motives. The next day, the bald guy literally says, ‘Hm, I wonder what yesterday was about. Uncle Kun asked all of us except Dou Dou and Shao Yang to come outside but nothing really happened. Why did he leave Dou Dou and Shao Yang here by themselves, do you think?’
I really can’t stand it when things are filled up with dialogue when it’s already so obvious what’s happening. Sometimes silent acting is so much powerful than spoken text.

Another thing that I noticed a couple of times is that sometimes there are some really sloppy continuity errors in between the scenes. At one point, Dou Dou delivers lunch at Jin Yuan’s office and you see her exit the room, leaving her bag on his desk. The next shot, she walks out of the building – holding that same bag. I mean, come on, did they honestly not notice this when editing? Besides that, there was this shot where Uncle Kun’s right hand man (I believe they call him Third Uncle) was pointing a rifle at Dou Dou. The next shot he was suddenly standing next to her with his hands folded. Things like that are just sloppy.

On the other hand, the scenery shots are really beautiful. In Chinese dramas they are really good at mapping the environment, bird’s eye view city shots but also panning over rice fields, bringing color into buildings to make things look appealing. So that’s something I like about it. However, story-wise, I’m not enjoying it as much as I’d hoped. Every character has an aspect I don’t agree with and sometimes some directing choices are just weird.
A few other examples being Qiao Liang holding his phone in front of his colleague WHILE HE’S DRIVING. He be like ‘look at this message I got’, making his colleague look WHILE HE’S DRIVING. Doesn’t this even get you minus ranking points in China? And for god’s sake, you’re supposed to be a police officer? Do you even know about safe driving?
And then, another part that I really couldn’t understand. Qiao Liang and another Haibin officer are after this drug trafficking truck. They’ve received news from their superior that they ought to go to another location because they received a tip that the exchange is taking place elsewhere. This is to get them off Jin Yuan’s trail. However, Qiao Liang pushes on and discovers that they are tailing the right truck after all. His superiors urge him to come back (because it’s Jin Yuan driving the truck and they can’t have them find out), but Qiao Liang pushes on, keeps driving, and when he catches up with him he cuts the truck off, leading to an accident. The truck plunges into one side of the car and they’re both knocked unconscious for a moment. Jin Yuan flees, Qiao Liang sees him from behind as he comes to. He then doesn’t even check whether his colleague is okay, he’s just like ‘He’s running away, come on, we gotta go after him!!’ He doesn’t even look twice at his colleague who still has his eyes closed. I’m sorry, but isn’t the safety of your fellow men more important? It’s things like this that make me wonder whether the writers really now how police officers are supposed to be.
Luckily, they are both okay, and the next day they’re all merrily throwing a party because they at least got the truck with the drugs in it and they’re all just laughing and no one is like ‘Dude, you almost got yourself and your colleague killed in this accident’.
Both in the maffia house and in the police force, people are acting so casual and it’s really making me uncomfortable. If it’s their intention to make this a serious story, they should make the people in it act more realistically.
If I were kept hostage in a maffia house, I wouldn’t open my mouth to make snarky comments to my capturers. Especially when they’re wearing arms. Just saying, there’s a difference between bravery and plain stupidity.

So, that was my review for the second half of Love’s Lies. However negative my criticism may sound, I do have to admit that it’s getting slightly more interesting now and I’m just very curious with what they’re going to fill up the remaining 22 episodes.

For now I’m going to retreat into another romantic comedy, just for some distraction. I’ll update this review when I finish the second half!
Wait for it, bye-bye!