Yes it is a timeless story! No matter how many times they remake it, how many different variations they manage to come up with, I am going to lap it all up and ask for more!
Actually, I dropped this after the first episode: I really did not like the female lead actress. No, I really did not like any of the actors because they look too old as teenagers. But eventually, since ALL of the actors looked too old, I got used it and did not mind it at all.Still I took me about a month to pick this up again. And I binge watched it overnight: episodes are short so it is an easy watch.
Ugly duckling in school, Hagino adult has become a beautiful woman and a make up expert thanks to being cruelly rejected by her highschool crush. Angry, after a fight with her best friend, she tears a photograph of them together and is transported to time when the photo is taken. She realizes she had become a teen again but kept her adult knowledge which she uses to become a swan and have her crush fall for her.
Time slip is one of my favourite tropes. The reason for the time slip was a curse put on her by a jealous other best freind of her best friend.
Here it is used to show the FL that her extreme shyness is not wrong and that people can actually SEE her behind the mask she wears. Beauty is only skin deep and real friends and lovers see beyond that. In the beginning she wanted to hold on to her newfound high school popularity but eventually came to understand that she was cheating and that all her life experiences had made her the person she's showing to her high school friends. And even though her friends and her crush did not want her to leave, she explained her reasoning to them.
The pace of the drama was changing all the time: sometimes very slow and repetitive then too rushed towards the ending. I felt like there were two episodes too many in the first helf and an episode missing in the end.
The main couple had decent chemistry and they were quite cute together. The best friend was a bit disconcerting: she wore a happy go lucky face at all occasion but it was obvious she had deep wounds she was hiding and did not know how to deal with them but avoid them!
This turned out to be a decent watch, not too complicated and charming with lovely music.