Ariana Grande at the 83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 11, in Beverly Hills, Calif.Monica Schipper/Getty Images
The video for Petal, the title track of Ariana Grande’s new album, opens with a viewer-discretion advisory, warning of graphic violence to come. But it’s not the blood-spattering, limb-severing scenes that have been upsetting many viewers. It’s the way Grande looks.
A celebrity’s weight is none of our business. But the internet, while at times treading carefully lest one be accused of body-shaming, has made it theirs.
You can’t help but notice her matchstick arms, her rib cage like horizontal stripes across her chest, her collarbones jutting out so prominently they become a shelf for her double strand of pearls. Her giant eyes seem even more gigantic against her hollow cheekbones.
This is not the catty commentary that tends to arise from a high-profile celebrity’s noticeable weight drop (“Ozempic?”). This is something else. Grande’s fans – and others – are concerned she might have an eating disorder. The tragedy of Karen Carpenter, a gifted musical talent who died at 32 as a result of anorexia in 1983, has been evoked.
The Petal music video was released on Friday. On Sunday, Grande announced she would be stepping back from the public eye after her current tour. That includes dropping out of the musical Sunday in the Park with George, scheduled for next summer in London, in which she was to play the lead. She needed a break, the statement said, from the “endless, ongoing public scrutiny.”
On Monday night, during a Chicago concert, Grande, reading from her phone, said the decision was not reactive or impulsive; she had quietly made it some time ago “from a thoughtful and empowered place,” she said, as the crowd cheered wildly. “And I want you to know that many things can be true at the same time.”
Is it ever okay to discuss a celebrity’s body weight?
Grande, who was a teen star in the Nickelodeon system, has been through a hell of a lot in her 33 years, including the terrorist bombing at the end of a 2017 concert in Manchester that killed 22 people and injured about 250 others. Hours later, she tweeted that she was “broken.” She was 23.
Whatever is (or isn’t) going on with Grande is not, I repeat, our business. But here’s what is: Ari, as her fans call her, is a superstar, a role model to masses of young females. She has 363 million Instagram followers. On Spotify, some of her songs have billions of streams.
Grande is worthy of admiration. She is an extremely talented singer, songwriter, actor. She’s hilarious. And beautiful. Girls, teens and young women may see her career, life, talent – and looks – as aspirational. They may not have Ari’s God-given vocal chops, but they may wish to emulate her in other ways.
In the Petal video, a panel of old men, commenting on Grande’s character’s various audition attempts, repeatedly stamps her applications as “not good enough” and decides she’s “inauthentic.”
“The way you used to be, I miss that,” one of the casting guys comments as she changes her look from audition to audition, to nobody’s approval.
Meanwhile, outside, the delicate flower rising from the cracked sidewalk wilts. After the bloody scene in the audition room, the fingers falling to the floor, a little flower grows back, next to the Hollywood star that bears the ingenue’s name.
“All of my favourite stories end in some kind of catastrophe,” she sings. “But I don’t need someone to save me.”
The discourse about Grande is not mean-spirited celebrity gossip, nor is it just public hand-wringing about a famous person’s meltdown, a la gossip blogger Perez Hilton during an alarming livestream Tuesday night. While concern about his health is warranted, it seems unlikely that others will try to emulate this behaviour on a mass scale.
Eating disorders are dangerous and far too common. There were an estimated 55.5-million eating disorder (ED) cases globally in 2019, according to a 2025 commentary in Canada’s Public Health Agency’s scientific journal that calls for increased measurement of EDs. As Health Canada warns, if they are not recognized and addressed, eating disorder behaviours can result in serious problems.
The Canadian Mental Health Association reports that about 90 per cent of people diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia are female. Eating disorders often start in the teenage or young adult years, but a 2014 CMHA paper cites a startling statistic: that up to 40 per cent of nine-year-old girls have dieted to lose weight.
We cannot diagnose Grande; we can’t know what’s going on in her life. We can wish her well. We can talk to our kids, our family and friends. And if you’re reading this and worried about yourself, you can seek help from an organization or a counsellor. Please take care.