I've never been a big Ariana Grande fan. I don't care for her style of music but there's no doubt she can really sing. Really the only time I've paid any attention to her is when she sort of intersected with things beyond music. I remember the whole donut fiasco. (She was caught on video licking donuts in a shop and had to apologize.) That was more than a decade ago now.
And of course I remember the 2017 bombing which happened in Manchester at one of her concerts. Twenty-two people were killed in that attack and hundreds more were injured. The bomber was an Islamic extremist named Salman Abedi. The attack didn't have any connection to Grande other than the fact that Abedi thought her concert was a soft target where he could kill a lot of young people.
Beyond that I remember seeing the first Wicked movie when it came out in 2024. And I remember thinking that Ariana Grande looked too thin and not very healthy. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Grande is on tour and just released a new music video. Many people who saw it were struck by how thin she looked. Here's the video in question.
After people started reacting to her appearance, her spokesperson released a statement saying she would be taking time off from public life after the tour ended. That included dropping out of a stage show she was scheduled to be in. It seemed like an admission that something was wrong, though the statement didn't quite say that.
But anyone who looks at her can see something is wrong.
The singer-actress, 33, has been noticeably slender for a long time; her appearance during press tours for the two “Wicked” movies prompted concerns about her health. But in a music video released Friday, she looks emaciated.
“Petal” begins with a content warning — the video features Grande as a starlet taking bloody revenge on casting directors — but online commenters wondered if the warning should apply to Grande’s body itself. Here, I’m aware of the fine line between disgust and inspiration for people with eating disorders, so please proceed with caution:
Grande’s cheeks appear to be sunken. Her clavicles and upper rib cage protrude. Her arms seem to be entirely lacking fat or muscle and instead to be sinew on bone. Her legs, what we can see of them, are spindly. Online, a dietitian I follow posted a hesitant video explaining that while she generally refrains from publicly commenting on other people’s bodies, she was going to use Grande’s video to educate viewers on the signs she looks for when diagnosing malnutrition at an anorexia/bulimia treatment program. The dietitian then dispassionately pointed out that Grande’s body, at least the parts that were visible, fit nearly every criterion.
She needs help, but it's 2026 and we're not supposed to objectify women, even if that means just saying they appear ill. So there was a bunch of hand-wringing in the media about stating the obvious.
If she is ill, then should we communicate that this is not a healthy body; this is a body born of deprivation disguised as glamour? If she is healthy, then should we support her right to look as she pleases, even while explaining to our children that most women’s bodies will not naturally look like this unless something is very wrong? Does she owe us an explanation either way?...
After six years of writing about gender and a year of writing about our relationship to screens, and after more than four decades as a woman — after all that, what I’m left with is that I still have no idea how to talk about Ariana Grande.
CNN has a similar entry making similar points.
No one outside Ariana Grande’s personal circle knows the reason, if any, that she appears to have lost weight. Her health is private; her image is visible everywhere. The space between those two premises is filled with speculation, and with arguments about whether it’s right or wrong to speculate.
What is the audience’s business? What is it culpable for? It’s been 43 years now since the platinum-selling singer Karen Carpenter died at the age of 32 of heart failure brought on by anorexia and bulimia. Fans by the thousands had watched her dwindle away over the years.
But once you get past all the concern about being inappropriate, the problem is obvious.
“WHAT YOU SEE HERE IS NOT NORMAL,” the eating-disorder recovery advocate Charli Howard wrote on Instagram to accompany stills of the “Petal” video.
Howard wrote, “I think it’s vital we discuss imagery/videos/content like these and the damage they can — and will — have on women and girls.”
“This poor woman is possibly dying right in front of us. This outfit is designed to accentuate the thinness for discourse,” the actress Jameela Jamil wrote in the comments. “Her team are thoroughly irresponsible for not guiding her away from this deeply damaging image for her young fans to see so glamorized.”
The response to that was a bunch of comments saying Howard was out of line and not being helpful. People can all see that Grande looks dangerously thin and yet they are as worried about people being too mean to her as they are about seeing her get help.
My own take as someone who is a very casual observer of her career, is that this problem was obvious two years ago and it's even worse now. This story is not going to end happily if people around her continue to tell her she looks fine because they don't want to be mean. She doesn't look fine. She looks like she's got a serious eating disorder which is going to take her life if she doesn't get help very soon. I'm not saying that to be mean. I'm saying that because it seems too few people have been willing to tell her the truth. She needs to get that help now so she can continue to have a long and successful life. And, finally, this current version of Grande is not someone we want millions of little girls idolizing and emulating.
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