The transformation of a reality TV star
Angela White is done with Blac Chyna. She’s finding her true self through love and faith and without fillers.
ANGELA WHITE is radiant. When she walks up to our table at a cafe in Calabasas, there are no cameras and no filters. She is petite with a big personality and laugh. Her face is flawless and exudes warmth when she smiles. She is happy. Really, truly happy with the Angela she is now.
She is honest that interviews are not always her favorite thing. Not when she has been burned before. Not when her openness hasn’t always been met with graciousness. Yet she has slowly aimed to open up more. After all, she has nothing to be ashamed of.
The price of White’s beauty over the years could be best summed up in needles, injections, fillers, burning sensations and judgment. When White was getting cosmetic procedures, they didn’t hurt. But when she videotaped herself getting cheek fillers removed last March, the reality TV star said it stung and burned.
The needle pricks and breast and butt reduction surgeries within the last year were the cost of change that White was determined to undergo physically, emotionally and spiritually in a less than kind or forgiving media environment. But whatever you call this phase of her life — a transformation or metamorphosis — Blac Chyna, Chyna or Angela will do — White is eager to see who she will become.
She initially considered this to be her soft girl era but has changed her mind about that. She is calmer, more patient and focused on herself. “I was hiding Angela, because I had just been hurt so much throughout the years,” White said when we first met in September.
“I feel like as a woman in this industry, people will try to walk all over you and make you seem less than, and that’s just other people’s insecurities. And when their insecurities rub off on you, you kind of start looking at yourself different.”
White first hit the celebrity scene more than a decade ago as a 19-year-old exotic dancer who became Nicki Minaj’s music video stunt double; she eventually became a video vixen after rapper Drake saw her working in a Miami club and shouted her out in the song “Miss Me.”
She morphed into a reality television star, making headlines in 2016 when she started dating Kardashian brother Rob and became pregnant. That led to the couple’s E! reality show “Rob & Chyna.” The show documented their relationship, which went from promising to rocky during production, and they later split up. She has also been part of the cast of the BET reality show “The Black Hamptons.”
White was also on the subscription site OnlyFans when the pandemic hit in 2020; there, she posted adult-only content. White told Forbes that she made $2 million in a two-year span on it. She deleted her account in 2022 as part of her personal journey and out of concern for her kids. In addition to her daughter with Kardashian, White has a son with her ex, rapper Tyga.
Amid all the changes, White was a cast member in the latest season of the Fox show “Special Forces.” She also had parts in the Tubi platform movies “Vicious Affair” and “Forever Us.”
Blac Chyna is the brand but also White’s protection, since “Blac Chyna is not having it with nobody, like if it’s bad business, she’s not having it. Disrespect, she’s not having it,” she says referring to alter ego in third person.
White said that she can also be no nonsense but that Blac Chyna wasn’t always very soft. “I’m soft to the people that I need to be soft with, that give me respect, and I give that respect back,” White said. “If people want to be nasty and rude, I’m still not going to give that back, but I’m going to guard myself. I don’t want people to think that, ‘Oh, I’m soft. Because I’m not.’ I’m a soft person, I’m a gentle person, but I’m not soft . ... This is not an era for me.”
White, who grew up in Washington, D.C., always felt beautiful as a child. She remembers being made fun of sometimes for the size of her forehead but overall liked how she looked.
For a beauty and style icon, White looked up to her mother, Shalana Hunter, known as Tokyo Toni, for being a true “glam girl.” She also loved Jennifer Lopez.
When White looked at a photo of herself from when she was 12, she realized she had already developed physically but was flat-chested.
“I couldn’t wait to turn 18, get me some boobs ... you couldn’t tell me nothing,” White said with a laugh. “I wanted to look like a woman before my time, in which all of that stuff is going to come with age. You start to fill out, and then you start to thin out, and I feel like I’m starting to thin out.”
But White became more determined to get cosmetic work done while she was working as an exotic dancer. She started with butt injections, then breast implants and face and lip fillers. The women she saw making the most money were the ones who had all those things.
“You’re looking around and seeing fully developed women like that, you’re like ‘I want to look like that,’ ” White recalled. “I needed a big rump, so that’s what I got. Video vixens at the time had the breasts and the body and all of that and it was really just to appease the male species, to collect money from them.”
After she had cosmetic work, White said her money and opportunities increased. She was known as the beauty with the blond hair, the face piercings, the dimples and the tattoos. She felt beautiful and, more important, that it aligned with her vision “to look like something out of this world . ... I wanted to look nonreal.
“I wanted that Hollywood look, like the Angelina Jolie carved-out symmetrical face. I just wanted everything to be perfect, because most of the models have very symmetrical faces, and the lips needed to be a certain way, but for me, I kind of started to go overboard.”
The decision to change her life came last year after she was baptized in her pool. White posted a video on Instagram in 2022 of a minister holding her head before pushing her underwater. White said she wasn’t thinking about anything at the time. After she was baptized, two of her friends decided to get into the baptismal pool too, a moment that makes White smile.
White said that she has always had a strong relationship with God but that she “just needed to come back so that he could really show me some cool stuff.”
Thinking about her faith in bigger ways is also one of the reasons she became sober in 2022. White said that although she wasn’t drinking every day, she would binge every couple days.
In talking about being sober for more than a year, White says “the blessing with that is that nothing happened for me to want to change.” She added that she’s glad she stopped drinking on her own terms and without a DUI, hurting someone or possibly even having her children being legally taken from her. She realized how alcoholism could eventually catch up to her in her personal life.
“I was drinking, I just had to open up my eyes and realize it,” White said. “And then not even just in front of people, even in private. A lot of times, we do things in private, or try to hide things from people, but once you start being real with yourself, that’s when you really see certain things, and your life is going to get better.”
But White also started taking a more intense look in the mirror and realized she no longer loved the woman she saw. Something had to change, so she called her doctor. White had her butt reduced. She also had breast reduction surgery. Initially, her doctors thought she would need a breast lift but White was concerned about scarring. Doctors had to remove her nipples, pull in her skin and then sew around the nipples again.
Although White had never been one to document her life by video, she said something compelled her to film herself — while still on pain medication — talking about her surgery, which she posted on Instagram. She woke up the next morning with her phone blowing up with notifications and assumed something had happened. Instead, she found many supportive comments. That reception gave White the courage to be open and honest about her experience.
“So many women have died from surgery, you know, and what I’ve learned is [that] we do it for ourselves but [that] nine times out of 10, we do it for other people or men,” White said.
Not long after that, White posted video of herself getting her fillers removed. It’s not for the needle phobic, as a doctor inserts a needle into White’s cheeks and lips and jiggles it around to dissolve the fillers. Viewers can slowly see White’s face turning back to its natural state. White has had to go back several times for additional treatments to remove the fillers.
The key things a woman considering surgery to remove enhancements needs to think about, White says, are finding a reputable doctor, not going abroad for cheaper rates and realizing that complications might not crop up until later. She pointed out that not every doctor she’s seen is willing to help repair complications.
White said the videos have had an effect, with many women expressing appreciation that she’s talked about her surgeries. White said she has no regrets about cosmetic procedures but believes she got lucky. The most complications she had were with her butt shots, when she sometimes got flulike symptoms. She said that years ago, she was in a hospital for a week due to complications from surgery. Some of her face fillers migrated.
“I’ve had a lot of women come up to me and say, ‘I was about to get this surgery and I was like, “Nah. I’m good,” ’ ” White said. “It’s just sad that the girls, even after I posted my surgery, I went on my socials, and I’ve seen women pass away from it.”
White had additional breast reduction surgery in late December. She posted on Instagram that there were complications, with her left breast becoming encapsulated, with the muscle contracting around her implant. White said she had to keep an implant. Otherwise, her breast would not be properly shaped.
She had said months before that she wanted her breasts to be smaller because she hoped for more acting roles. Within the next few years, she plans to get out of reality television.
She hopes this is the last time she has to do any procedures. “If I remove anything else, I’m gonna remove myself,” White joked.