I actually really liked True Beauty in the very beginning. Jugyeong was an interesting character, and I really related to her as someone who also wears makeup whenever they go out because of low self-esteem. I also loved her little obsession with horror and gore and found her to be quite cute.

We have two male leads, Suho and Seojun, and they aren't completely boring.
I liked how they had distinctively different personalities, and I enjoyed that they also had a long history with each other instead of being two random dudes that have inexplicably fallen for our MC.

You think one guy is endgame the whole time but then you find out that this manhwa suffers from "Second Lead Syndrome" and I really didn't mind it. It didn't destroy the story for me because at the end of the day, the point of True Beauty was Jugyeong and how she uses makeup to present herself as "beautiful", and the constant fear that she'll one day get discovered as a catfish and have her whole life blow up in her face or something dramatic. And then maybe she'll learn from this experience that the "true beauty" was inside herself the whole time, or something cliche like that.

Or at least it WAS.

As the story progressed I stared to realize that Jugyeong has had little to no character development. She's shallow and a hypocrite, constantly berating other people for "catfishing" when she's literally doing the EXACT same thing, and we the audience are made to feel like we're supposed to side with her. The author has almost completely dropped her "real personality", being that she loves horror and is a huge nerd, and all we ever see is her shallow personality and "pretty" face. The story is all about her boyfriend and relationship anxieties.

All of the promises that were made in the beginning of the story were never followed through on. It almost feels like the real Jugyeong doesn't exist anymore. All the anxieties she had in the beginning about being caught are gone. There's no personal struggle as to how she sees herself vs how the world sees her. She's just a superficial, bland insta baddie now and that's it. IDK how our male leads see anything in her considering that, comparatively speaking, they've had more character development than she has.

I guess she's supposed to be nice? I mean, she helped two different characters overcome their own low self esteem by giving them a makeover and covering all their facial imperfections with concealer. Personally I don't really like the message that sends but whatever I guess.

Also there's a bunch of side characters that you think are relevant in the beginning and then you never hear from them again. I guess the focus of the story shifted once the development for the kdrama began, and the author just switched gears out of nowhere to make True Beauty a more generic kdrama. (I haven't watched the kdrama yet, so hopefully they fix some of these issues with its adaptation).

All in all, True Beauty is still ongoing so I can only hope all of these issues will be fixed. However, the story is literally going nowhere and there is no end in sight. The bar is literally on the floor right now. Just one introspective thought from Jugyeong will actually amaze me, but my expectations are very low.

The art is still pretty and that's really the only saving grace.

Side note. I find it pretty weird that this manhwa is called True Beauty when Jugyeong's solution to everything is just covering up imperfections with makeup.