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- Ariana Grande’s alarming weight loss in her new ‘Petal’ music video raises serious concerns.
- The video, meant to address scrutiny, is overshadowed by 33-year-old Grande’s skeletal frame.
- Body positivity activist Charli Howard calls Grande’s appearance ‘not normal’ amid ‘thin-is-in’ culture.
Over the last three years, Ariana Grande has shrunk before our eyes.
And we need to talk about it, no matter how uncomfortable it might make us feel to pick apart a person’s body.
Because hundreds of millions of people across the world follow Grande on social media, many of them young, impressionable girls — and their developing body image and mental health depend on it.
And because Grande herself has invited the conversation, writing and filming a music video in which she brutally murders a tableful of men who have picked apart her body and her image.
She might have intended to use the film for her new single “Petal” to shut the conversation down, but how could we not talk about the fact that her protruding collarbones and skeletal body were the most dominant feature of the entire video?
33-year-old Grande was already alarmingly thin during her “Wicked” and “Wicked: For Good” press tours in 2024 and 2025.
Then during her recent Eternal Sunshine tour, it was impossible not to notice her twig-like, gaunt and, yes, scary-looking body.
But it was her latest ‘Petal’ video that became the hardest to ignore. In it, Grande plays Pepper, a Hollywood hopeful who is told again and again by casting directors that she is not good enough.
As the group of men critiques her looks and her weight, one character scrawls a note (despite Grande’s obviously skeletal form) that Pepper “couldn’t hurt to lose a few pounds”.
Eventually, Grande’s character — a literal shadow of her former self — snaps and, with a roaring chainsaw, hacks her row of critics gorily to death, emerging blood-spattered and victorious.
But the alarmingly thin state of her body obscures any intended message of self- or female-empowerment the music video might have to offer.
And it’s even more disturbing when you see her in scenes standing or sitting next to an army of almost rudely healthy other women.
Yes, it would be easier to say nothing and to appease her fans who say we should leave her alone.
But the message that would send to our younger sisters, cousins and daughters is that this is normal.
That it’s okay for them to question why their bodies don’t look like hers. That no one else will stand in their way if they try to emulate her look.
As a 29-year-old woman who started to struggle with body image issues as a young teen and still deals with them to this day, it breaks my heart that we would stand by and stay silent.
While the specific, personal reasons behind Grande’s weight loss are not — or at least shouldn’t be — any of the public’s business, our girls need to know that this shape for a body is not the norm.
What’s more, they need to know that it’s OK — and more importantly, healthy — if their body doesn’t look so thin. And that frail or sickly is certainly not the goal.
To question this growing societal idea of thinness equaling goodness, success and desirability doesn’t feel like being a busybody to me.
Instead, I maintain that it’s a valid concern for the mental health of the girls we love most.
The reality is that our girls are watching — quite literally, constantly, on social media as their idols are fed to them on Instagram and TikTok and Pinterest.
And we owe it to them to have these conversations, no matter how much ire they provoke, provided we have the necessary empathy, compassion and critical eye to conduct them properly.
Perhaps model and body positivity activist Charli Howard said it best in her recent Instagram post on Grande’s latest project, when she referenced her past as an eating disorder survivor and expressed how “vital” it is that we discuss content like this, along with the damage they can cause to women and girls.
“WHAT YOU SEE HERE IS NOT NORMAL,” posted Howard in all-caps. “Over the last few weeks, as images of Ariana’s concert get plastered around online, I obviously see comments from worried fans, but I also see other people convincing others that she looks ‘healthy,’ or that she has simply ‘lost puppy fat.’ Some even make jokes about it.”
“What I see is someone in desperate need of hospitalisation and care,” she continued, though it should be noted that neither Grande nor any of her reps have ever publicly confirmed any kind of eating disorder or health issue.
But with the uptick of SkinnyTok, a growing focus on weight-loss-inducing peptides (even for teens), and the normalization of thin-is-in culture, it is that much more important for the young and impressionable in our lives to see a proper role model they can go to for inspiration, both aesthetically and values-wise.
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