At 34 years old, Dawn is done with putting so much of her life online. She’s maintained a much lower profile since taking a step back to let the younger generation of influencers take centre stage, instead choosing to dabble in her family’s property business and work on growing her online clothing business,

Lexi Lyla

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Updating her Instagram these days is less about commercial gain and more for self-expression, which explains why her feed can appear less stylised than those from top-tier influencers. There only appears to be a loose, overarching feminine aesthetic, but she doesn’t command the same reach or engagement that younger names do.

Dawn is happy to be less active now, but it’s clear the elephant in the room still looms large. With the benefit of hindsight and a recent cultural shift in mindset about a woman’s agency over her own body choices, I dredge up her past.

“Have you ever been completely open about plastic surgery online?”

“Completely open? No, I don’t think I’ve actually come out and said anything ‘officially’,” she muses.

“Back then when the drama started, plastic surgery wasn’t as mainstream or common as it is now. At that time, it was just a personal choice and I didn’t feel that it was something that needed to be broadcasted. I felt that people would think it’s crazy, and there’d be backlash.”

Dawn was hyper aware of young girls who looked up to her, and didn’t want them to feel that they too had to get plastic surgery in order to emulate her. So she chose not to address the issue.

Even then, regardless of her decision to skirt the topic or feature messages of positivity alongside her Instagram photos, Dawn is part of the cycle that perpetuates the setting of unrealistic beauty standards for impressionable youth. Yet I hesitate to call her disingenuous, since she never proclaimed to be a role model.

Unfortunately, once rumours got blown out of proportion, she explains, “People thought I changed my whole face and got a boob job, and I can’t stop them from believing what they want. A lie told often enough becomes the truth. I think Vladimir Lenin once said that.”

Well, it’s 2018, so here is the truth: yes, Dawn Yang has done plastic surgery.

Specifically, when she was “about 19 or 20”, she got her nose fixed “because she wanted it to be nicer”. Some of her friends even got their own noses done with her.

She also made her natural double eyelids look more even.

“My parents were a bit aghast at first. They wondered what was going through my head, and warned me not to do too much, in case I ended up looking like Michael Jackson. But eventually they came to support my decision,” she says.

“I was very clear from the start that I only wanted to get my eyes and nose done. Nothing else. And I paid for everything with my own savings.”

Since then, Dawn has also gotten her overbite corrected and done Botox to make her jaw slimmer, which she posits has changed her profile a bit. And at present, she goes for aesthetic treatments, but just “outer stuff” like “lasers”.

Dawn lays bare these facts so honestly that I am initially taken aback, mostly by how straightforward her admission is, as though I’d asked what she had eaten for lunch. In the sobering wake of this discovery, I’m partly upset that the truth isn’t something more sensational, more headline-grabbing, and partly ashamed that that was what I expected.