Movies like My ID is Gangnam Beauty

Why it's similar — True Beauty is the explicit spiritual sequel to My ID is Gangnam Beauty, adapted from a Yaongyi webtoon that pushes the same conceit one register further: a high-school girl uses makeup rather than surgery to transform her face, then has to navigate the same campus politics around recognition and concealment. Both shows are the JTBC-and-tvN spine of late-2010s K-drama beauty-culture commentary.

Why it's similar — My Dearest Nemesis runs the same workplace-or-campus reunion trick the Mi-rae and Kyung-seok scenes are built on — two characters who knew each other in a more vulnerable earlier life meeting again in a setting where one of them has the social high ground — and uses the same slow, comic-then-tender register to release the recognition. The reveal-arc structure is shared scene for scene.

Why it's similar — Cheese in the Trap is the immediate genre predecessor of My ID is Gangnam Beauty within Korean webtoon-to-drama campus adaptations: a chemistry-of-strangers freshman-year romance, a manipulative outsider character calibrated to keep the audience guessing about motives, and a slow-build emotional finale that depends on whether the male lead is the rescuer or the antagonist. Both shows refuse the genre's instinct to resolve early.

Why it's similar — Kim Seong-yoon's Ji Chang-wook adaptation drops Gangnam Beauty's beauty-culture register and substitutes a magical-realist one, but its central character is in the same Mi-rae-shaped position: a bullied young woman trying to walk into a future her interior life keeps pulling her back from. The teen-vulnerability throughline is the closest tonal sibling to Mi-rae's freshman-year arc.

Why it's similar — Dear X takes the bullied-protagonist register of My ID is Gangnam Beauty and pushes it into adult thriller territory: a celebrity whose past as a bullied teenager catches up with her career, with the same online-photograph mechanism Soo-ah's middle-school bullies use as the engine. The longer-arc reckoning with the cruelty of Korean adolescent social media is the spine both shows share.