What We’re Not Talking About When We Talk About Ariana Grande

Content Warning: This article includes discussion of eating disorders.

Ariana Grande is currently the internet’s main character — but it’s for a pretty distressing reason. Over the past several years the Petal singer and Academy Award-nominated star of Wicked has been everywhere. But recently, the conversation around Grande hasn’t been about her performances or her latest album, but rather her body and increasing concerns over her health as well as speculation that the singer may be grappling with an eating disorder.

This isn’t anything new. In 2024, conversations around Grande’s body began to swirl during press for the Wicked franchise, after Grande and co-star Cynthia Erivo were photographed looking noticeably thinner; causing people to speculate on the reasons for the pairs’ weight loss. In 2025’s Wicked:For Good, Grande looked even more frail. More recently, videos of Grande performing onstage during her Eternal Sunshine world tour looking malnourished elicited further comments of concern from fans online, culminating in a furor on July 31 when Grande released the music video for “Petal,” the title song off her latest album of the same name.

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In the video, Grande plays a very clear version of herself; an auditioning actress named Pepper who’s repeatedly told she’s not good enough and needs to change, tweaking herself with every audition to fit the clearly unattainable expectations of the industry. Grande appears throughout the video looking thin and frail, most noticeably in one scene where she dons a black bodysuit reminiscent of Sandy in Grease. Since its release, the comments of the video have been flooded with concern from fans, writing: “It’s not about wanting the old Ariana back. It’s about wanting her to be healthy.” Another fan commented: “Seeing her ribcage and clavicle is truly terrifying. I hope she gets the help she needs soon or at least someone close to her steps up.”

Shortly after the video was released, Grande’s team issued a statement revealing that the pop star will be stepping back from the spotlight after her current tour and dropping out of co-starring in the previously announced stage production of Sunday in the Park with George alongside Jonathan Bailey. In a statement to People, a representative for Grande said: “Ariana will be taking a step back from visibility after she completes the Eternal Sunshine Tour. She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily, and then taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny,” the rep continued. “This tour has been a beautiful experience for her. She loves her fans and has loved every minute of this tour so much.”

Needless to say, it’s complicated — and people online are divided. The past several weeks have seen fans, trolls, and fellow celebs alike take to the internet to share their thoughts on Grande’s health and body, with comments ranging from genuine concern to insensitive statements that she should “just eat a cheeseburger” and debates over whether or not we should be talking about Grande’s body at all. 

On August 1, model Tess Holliday took to Instagram to share her opinion on the conversation, asking people to retire “the public body commentary era.” 

Around the same time, The Good Place actress Jameela Jamil took to social media to share her concerns for the star, replying to a post about the latest video, writing: “This poor woman is possibly dying right in front of us,” before criticizing her team as “irresponsible” for making decisions that clearly emphasize her small frame. Jamil was quickly criticized for her comments, before doubling down; emphasizing that it’s a complicated situation, but emphasizing that not saying anything means “we run the risk of normalizing that image to hundreds of millions of teenage girls, kids and even impressionable adults consuming her content.”

Actress & advocate Jameela Jamil made a comment of concern on Ariana Grande’s appearance in her recently released ‘Petal’ music video. Do you think the discourse is valid?

(????: YOUTUBE/INSTAGRAM) pic.twitter.com/Fd6CLix9oz

— OK! Magazine USA (@OKMagazine) August 2, 2026

So, how should we be talking about Ariana Grande? It’s not so clear cut. With the help of experts and people dealing with the complexity of eating disorders personally, we sift through the discourse and its dangers.

Should talking about Grande’s body be off limits? The answer requires nuance.

For dietician, author and the writer behind the Rethinking Wellness newsletter, Christy Harrison, this conversation swirling around Grande isn’t necessarily all that new. As any person, especially women, knows, celebrity bodies, especially celebrity female bodies, have always been heavily scrutinized.

And while often unfair, it makes sense that these people would be topics of conversation, given the role modern celebrities and their images play. “They’re held up as symbols of beauty,” Harrison tells Refinery29. “These images are not just a person’s own.” Instead, these celebrity images are carefully  manufactured by record labels, PR teams and other facets of the celebrity image-making machine to be viewed as idealized beauty standards or a goal that fans should strive to and want to emulate – at least to the point of purchasing what they’re selling; be it concert tickets, beauty lines or lifestyle. 

“There’s always this dynamic, there is always this conversation between what celebrity culture and Celebrities Inc. is pushing out there and then how the public is receiving that and responding,” Harrison says. Essentially, these images are being put out to be consumed, so it’s natural that consumers would have thoughts about them. “If this is what’s swirling around in the culture, if this is what’s publicly being put out there as someone’s image, I think the public has a right to a discourse about it,” Harrison adds. 

For Harrison, what is different about the current conversation around Grande from those of celebrities in the past, is the polarization in reactions online; a reality Harrison says is partly due to social media algorithms, which prioritize hot takes for virality instead of nuance. 

Another key difference for Harrison? “Ariana Grande is very emaciated.” 

While Harrisson emphasizes that we don’t know the specificity of Grande’s health, as she’s not shared anything publicly, “bodies that dramatically thin — we’re not talking about standard celebrities – we’re talking about this level of thinness that is concerning I think to many people; it raises alarm bells because of its association with sickness, stress, it makes it seem like there’s something going on…I think that’s part of what has created this sort of heightened moment about the discourse around her body. People are understandably feeling concerned for her, and there’s alarm bells going off that something isn’t right.”

We don’t need to know Grande’s medical history to know she’s clearly going through something — and we need to discuss that with care

While Dr. Courtney Simpson, Director of the Eating Disorders Centre at the Evidence Based Treatment Center of Seattle, agrees with Harrison about not speculating on an individual’s health, she points to Grande’s long career and visibility in the spotlight. Since she first came onto our screens in 2010, the public have seen Grande — and her body — through various stages as she’s gone through puberty and young adulthood. That is no doubt a difficult position for Grande; something she has spoken about openly, often exploring the parasocial relationship between herself and her fans in her music. In 2024’s “Yes, And?” Grande addressed this head on, singing: “My face is sitting, I don’t need no disguise / Don’t comment on my body, do not reply / Your business is yours, and mine is mine.” 

But for Simpson, this time in the spotlight also serves as an indicator that something is at least different with Grande and her body right now. “With someone like Ariana Grande, we have seen her body change over time,” Simpson says. “And so there’s evidence to support that something’s going on there; whether it’s an eating disorder or not — you can have other conditions that can contribute to losing a bunch of weight.”

While Simpson notes that you can’t necessarily tell that someone is struggling with an eating disorder by just looking at them, “she doesn’t look healthy or well,” Simpson says.  Which means, for Simpson, that conversations around Grande’s body, weight and mental health need to be handled with care “Whatever the cause, [we should be] thinking about framing the conversation as: something appears to be going on that’s contributing to her looking malnourished and that’s concerning,” Simpson says.

And, Grande shouldn’t be attacked and vilified for this. Much of the initial conversations around Grande and her weight painted it as a moral failing of sorts. This goes back to the parasocial relationship many fans have with celebs. In a 2011 interview with VOGUE, Rihanna infamously said she didn’t want to be a role model, and time and time again we’ve seen instances of celebrities held to higher standards by their fans and the public due to their visibility. But what’s lost in this inherent expectation is the fact that, at the end of the day, Grande is a human being, meaning she’s not always going to — and maybe can’t necessarily — make the decisions the public deems as “correct.”

“Eating disorders specifically…they’re not a choice,” Simpson adds. “They’re not something that someone chooses, they’re not something that somebody one day wakes up and [says]: this is fun. It’s a complex interaction between biology and environment.”

But at the same time, Ariana Grande is a public figure, and that can come with consequences

While Grande and her team may just want public scrutiny to go away, the thing is that, it can’t. Celebs like Grande may not have signed up to be role models for the masses, but the truth is that by virtue of their roles and their success, they inevitably have become that. Meaning that what they do, say, and yes, even how they look, sends a very public message about what’s accepted and viewed as the norm — and that can negatively impact young people or trigger those who are currently grappling with or in recovery from an eating disorder.

A 2024 global study from the University of Waterloo found that 55% of youths surveyed between the ages of 10-17 felt dissatisfied with their bodies, with social media as a large factor impacting this. And the conversation around Grande’s body, as well as “concern trolling” comments online have reportedly caused an influx of calls to eating disorder helplines in the UK, with clinicians reporting clients who are upset about the constant scrutiny and public comments about Grande’s body. 

As journalist Nicole Russel noted in an opinion piece for USA Today about Grande, “it’s a double edged sword: Her celebrity status doesn’t exempt her from scrutiny, but that scrutiny should stay constructive and kind.” Especially when, as Russell points out, her health and appearance are topics of conversation based on a music video she herself would have produced and approved. 

Madison Mazzeo has experienced the impact of this firsthand. The 31-year-old Phoenix-based podcaster is currently in recovery for an eating disorder, something she has dealt with since she was 16-years-old. As someone who was initially in a larger body, she says, “the thing that’s actually been the most triggering to me is watching people applaud [Grande’s] body and applaud its changes and defend it.”

“I got a lot of comments about being in a larger body and so the second I got into a smaller body, people were all telling me how much healthier I looked and how good I looked. I feel like she [has] had a pretty similar trajectory,” she says of Grande.  

Both Harrison and Simpson have also encountered clients feeling activated or impacted by both the conversation around Grande’s body as well as the overall return to extreme thinness in society right now with the proliferation and increased accessibility of weight loss drugs.  

“The thing that happens with our brains is that the more that we see a certain type of image, piece of information, the more we get used to it and the more it becomes normalized,” Simpson says. “What that means is that we’re getting used to that as a standard, even if we’re not trying.” 

And constantly reinforcing the message that this is what a healthy body does — and should — look like. 

For both Simpson and Harrison, this concern is especially pertinent for young people, whose media literacy skills and ability to discern and think critically about the images in front of them is still developing.”It’s not just concern for her, it’s concern for ourselves and the fear that the beauty standard is shrinking to ever-smaller proportions in a way that I think we fear that’s going to become what’s expected of us as women,” Harrison adds. “As everyday women, that’s the new standard that we’re going to have to adhere to, not just unattainably thin, the way that we’ve seen from celebrities for decades, but distressingly thin perhaps thin to the point of illness or something going on that just feels like this could actually be deadly.” 

And it’s this concern — and impact — that takes this particular conversation beyond the typical refrain to never talk about women’s bodies — because this is an extreme example. As journalist Stacy Lee Kong noted in a recent edition of pop culture newsletter Friday Things, the idea that it’s taboo to talk about celebrities’ weight and bodies makes sense philosophically, especially when you look at examples like the fatphobia inherent in comments about singer Adele’s thinner body in 2020. But as she says, it doesn’t entirely make sense to expect people to ignore when a celeb’s appearance changes, considering that’s the currency they tend to run on. And it’s especially nonsensical to use the idea of never talking about women’s bodies as an excuse to not address potential real-world harm. 

Are these conversations helping people with eating disorders? We need to think about the message this debate sends.

With all that being said, it’s important to also take a larger look at the people and systems surrounding Grande right now, and question them, too. 

The announcement from Grande’s team noted that the pop star would be taking a step back from the spotlight, because of the “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” it has led to; reinforcing that Grande is healthy. For Mazzeo, this framing, for a celebrity with such a large platform, is not only problematic, but also potentially harmful.  “There’s a difference when you’re in the public eye and you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with an eating disorder’ versus I’’m the healthiest I’ve ever been and you shouldn’t assume otherwise,’” she says. While Mazzeo notes that Grande doesn’t owe us transparency on whether or not she’s dealing with an eating disorder (or another illness), it’s the constant assurance that she’s fine and healthy that’s an issue. “Because I think that is very dangerous, to be clearly malnourished and tell everybody that you’re healthy,” she says. 

And there are many people behind the scenes that would go into that decision. As Stacy Lee Kong says in the same Friday Things newsletter, it’s important to ask questions about what’s really happening here. As Lee Kong asked: “Why is her team so invested in portraying her as healthy and happy? Do they really have her best interests at heart, or are they invested in protecting her tour’s profitability? What professional responsibilities are at play here?”

“Celebrities are a business,” Harrison says. “A business in line of fire is always going to say ‘everything’s great’ or ‘we’re listening and learning’ or ‘we’re taking some time to reflect.’ This is a common trope. It’s not specific to her situation, it’s damage control.”

What remains important is how we, as the public, engage in conversations around Grande’s appearance with those in our lives. For people viewing these images who may feel impacted by them, Harrison suggests taking a social media break and stepping away from the discourse if you’re able to. “Getting back into real life, getting some support, getting some help for your own disordered eating or body image distress, that’s really what’s most important.”

If you are struggling with an eating disorder and are in need of support, please call the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. For a 24-hour crisis line, text “NEDA” to 741741.

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