Heather Rae Young is now wheeling and dealing in mansions for a living as a real estate agent on Selling Sunset. But the pages of Playboy is where it all began for the blonde beauty, and she has no qualms about posing nude for the magazine in her younger years.
“It catapulted my career, it changed my life, it was the most defining moment in my life.” Heather, 34, told U.K.’s The Sun, adding, “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done. I’m proud of my life. Everything I’ve done has got me to where I am today.”
Heather was working as a model when she was discovered after attending a Playboy casting session in June 2008. The agents liked what they saw, as she got her big break as Playboy‘s Playmate of the Month in February 2010, which was her first taste of fame.
This isn’t the first time the Netflix star has lavished praise on her opportunity to pose for the magazine. She told the publication in May 2020 that she would not have “met the people who led me to where I am now” without appearing in Playboy. Heather said that the experience “changed my life for the better,” and that it helped her to be more comfortable in front of the camera, which would later go on to help her while appearing on Selling Sunset.
In addition to starring on the high-end real estate reality show, Heather is now a newlywed and a stepmom. She married HGTV’s Flip or Flop star Tarek El Moussa on October 23, 2021, in a lavish ceremony near Santa Barbara, California. Heather is now the stepmother to Tarek’s two children with ex-wife, Christina Haack.
How she’s going to tell stepdaughter Taylor, 11, and stepson Brayden, 6, about her past posing in the buff is a bridge she hasn’t crossed yet. “I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to tell the kids I did Playboy,” she explained to The Sun.
But as she told Playboy in her 2020 interview, “Posing nude is a celebration of our bodies and our choices, and I find it empowering.” So maybe she can use personal empowerment as a jumping-off point when she’s ready to tell Taylor and Brayden about her nude modeling past.