Make-up artist and beauty influencer Mei Pang talks to Tatler about fostering positivity online despite the negativity she has encountered there, and how her ongoing journey of sobriety has opened doors for her
What sets your soul on fire?
For Malaysian make-up artist Mei Pang, it’s the thrill of outdoing herself—whether that’s finding a new technique to create a beauty look, completing another yoga class or committing to one more day of sobriety.
“Sobriety saved my career,” Toronto-based Pang says. Her shaved head, praying mantises on each temple (plus a further plethora of matching tattoos) and razor-sharp eyeliner might lead one to assume she’s hardcore; a rebel. They’d be partly correct—she’s hardcore, but these days only about establishing her sense of self, fostering positivity online and maintaining her health to share and celebrate with others.
“I wake up at five in the morning, I do my make-up and I feel incredibly productive. And I do it with a clear head,” she says. “Professionally, I make the right decisions. I’m not swayed by anything. Whenever I show up to work, I’m doing it 100 per cent, and people can see that, and they appreciate it. That’s why I’ve had so many opportunities.”
The 26-year-old beauty influencer has an impressive combined following of more than 4 million across Instagram and TikTok. She has modelled for for Rihanna’s lingerie line Savage x Fenty, and even appeared as a guest judge on Canada’s Drag Race, a spinoff of the original RuPaul’s Drag Race. But this success has not come easily; when she first started as an influencer, she was dealing with the challenges of creating a platform for herself on YouTube and an unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyle involving too much alcohol.
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“My tolerance was so high, I was drinking two bottles of wine a night—I was a party girl going way too hard. I knew that this was a problem, but I’d brush it off thinking, ‘I’m young, this is what I’m supposed to do’,” Pang says of her past habits. “I was an angry drunk, incredibly combative and mean, and I would get in fights with everybody. I didn’t really have good friends—at least, not any that would tolerate me, because I was so venomous. I had lot of unbridled anger that stemmed from not fitting in.”
Pang is referring to the otherness she felt as a third-culture kid growing up in a small town in Canada. “I was one of three Asian kids in my school. My parents were strict—I was the oldest child and they wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer, but they’d also shaped me to be as westernised as possible. Art was my first form of rebellion.”
She went to arts university for traditional drawing and painting—and also developed many of her make-up application techniques—but dropped out in her final year in 2015, partly due to the difficulties she faced with alcohol.
By 2019, Pang realised something had to change. But the decision to give up alcohol didn’t come overnight, and, ironically, was spurred by the idea of getting drunk. She says, “My birthday is August 28. On August 5, I decided I would stop drinking, so on the night of my party I [could] have a blackout rager. The day rolled around, and I didn’t even drink, because those three weeks were lovely, so I kept on going; and now here we are three years later.”
The reaction of people who followed her on YouTube was not entirely supportive, however. “I’d posted a video about being six months sober, and I was really struggling at that time,” she says about her first experiences discussing the topic online. “In the comments section, there were people being nice, but of course a ‘boo’ is ten times louder than a cheer. Some people said, ‘You’re a waste of space anyway, just keep on drinking,’ or ‘Alcohol isn’t even that bad,’ and I just thought, ‘Yeah, this is not good for my mental health.’”
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