Dowding is a Page Three girl, glamour model, television celebrity, and former beauty queen.

Dowding earned eleven GCSEs and three A-levels. While studying for an economics degree at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Surrey, the eighteen-year-old entered and won the 1998 Miss Great Britain competition. In Hawaii later that year she became the first woman of Asian descent to represent Britain in the Miss Universe pageant.

After her success in beauty pageants, Dowding dropped out of university to pursue a full-time modelling career. Although she had not originally considered topless modelling, she started appearing as a Page Three girl in The Sun newspaper in 1999. Her younger sister Melanie ("Mel") Dowding also had a brief career as a Page Three girl, and the sisters have posed together for topless photo shoots.

Dowding has been a guest on various British television shows, modelling on the Big Breakfast and This Morning, and appearing on The Weakest Link, Faking It and Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Fear Factor. She has also enjoyed a season in pantomime as Tiger Lilly in Peter Pan.

She has travelled to Bosnia, Kosovo. Iraq and Cyprus on morale-boosting trips for British troops abroad