Cherry Dee is the stage name of Cherry Daniella Andrea Frampton, a former glamour model and Page 3 personality born in Buckley, Flintshire. She began entering children's beauty pageants as a toddler, winning her first competition at ten months old and going on to collect more than 200 trophies, including Miss Llandudno and Junior Miss Wyre Forest, at a modelling school run by Roz Tranfield in Liverpool. She attended Elfed High School in Buckley and set her sights on competing for Miss Wales, before deciding at fourteen that, at five feet two inches, she was too short to continue.
Her mother, Corinne Limbert, worked at a shop in Chester where she met glamour models and encouraged her daughter to try modelling shortly before Cherry's sixteenth birthday. Cherry made her topless debut in the Daily Sport on 10 August 2003, two months after turning sixteen. At the time she was working as the mascot for Buckley Town F.C.; the club stood her down from the role once questions were raised by the Football Association of Wales about a minor's association with the club after her topless pictures appeared in the national press. The early months of her career were documented in the HTV Wales film On the Edge, broadcast in January 2004.
The Sexual Offences Act 2003 raised the legal age for this kind of photography from sixteen to eighteen, forcing Cherry to put her modelling career on hold until her eighteenth birthday. She relaunched successfully, going on to appear in the Daily Star, The Sun, Nuts and Fast Car, and was voted Miss Sunday Sport 2007 with 77 percent of the public vote, a title that led to the Sunday Sport releasing a perfume based on her own scent. In August 2007, aged twenty, she announced her retirement from glamour modelling, saying in later interviews that she had grown tired of pressure within the industry to take drugs and pose for increasingly explicit photographs.
Cherry moved back to Wales, retraining as a hairdresser at Deeside College (now Coleg Cambria) with the intention of opening her own salon. Working part-time in a care home while building her hairdressing business, she found she preferred the work of looking after elderly residents, and moved into care work full-time, later expressing an ambition to study for a nursing degree.