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Pop stars, especially women, get compared to each other all the time, but Ariana Grande probably didn’t expect so many parallels to Karen Carpenter. Despite the musicians’ sonic and narrative differences, their similarities are self-evident. Both became very famous very young, with Grande starting on Nickelodeon in the early 2000s before becoming a solo artist, and Carpenter performing as a teenager with her brother in the ’70s. Both have been praised for their vocal range, both married (and divorced) men in California real estate, and both spent much of their 20s and the beginnings of their 30s being scrutinized by audiences, tabloids, and, lately, the internet.
Grande and Carpenter are increasingly being talked about in the same breath not because of their art but because of the discourse around their art. In 1983, at just 32, Carpenter died from complications following years of anorexia. She never discussed having the illness publicly, instead famously telling a journalist that her gauntness and frailty were because she “was just pooped” from working so hard. But during her life, she sought treatment for anorexia, and after she died, her family established a foundation in her name to further aid in research of the disorder.
Grande has never publicly admitted to any kind of disordered eating or unhealthy weight loss. She has maintained that she’s perfectly happy in the body she has now. “The body that you’ve been comparing my current body to was the unhealthiest version of my body. I was on a lot of anti-depressants and drinking on them and eating poorly,” she said in a 2023 TikTok. “I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies.” Her art has contended with this kind of attention too; in the track “Yes, And?,” off 2024’s Eternal Sunshine, she sings, “Don’t comment on my body, do not reply.” But in the comments of many Grande-related TikToks lately, Carpenter’s name is coming up. “They’re the same age!” one user noted on a video about how fatigued Grande looks onstage.
Grande has been on tour for Eternal Sunshine, and clips from these concerts have been going viral for months: In these videos, her arms put her sinew on display, her sternum peeks through her skin, and her shoulders and elbows are especially sharp. In viewing her—which is what she asks of us as consumers of her art, and something she sells to us on purpose—we’re stuck trying to avoid making unkind or unfair judgments on someone else’s body, while also wondering if we might one day be too late to save her from a fate like Carpenter’s.
On TikTok or Reddit, wherever fans and detractors gather, there’s plenty of talk about whether Grande is in personal peril. There’s speculation about her diet, whether she looks healthy, her appearance on tour. It intensified in June, when she announced the end of her relationship with Ethan Slater, her boyfriend of three years, the inspiration behind Eternal Sunshine, who was married with a child when they met on the set of Wicked. Since then, she’s been spotted holding hands with Ricky Alvarez, her ex-boyfriend name-checked on “Thank U, Next.” On Friday, her new album Petal was released, an event that perhaps could have steered the conversation back toward her musical pursuits rather than her personal ones. It has mostly done the opposite.
All this attention—on her dating life, her artistry, her blood and bones—seems to have gotten to her. She’s in Chicago and then London for the next month to finish out her tour, but her reps have announced that this will be the last we see of her for a while. “She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily,” a rep told People this week, “and then taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny.” It’s the least intimate kind of celebrity statement, one delivered coldly through a representative, not from the star themselves on Instagram, a slap on the grubby hands of her audience.
When Grande released Petal—her eighth full-length record—she also released a music video for the title song. Although the record may have 12 songs to pick apart, the video is taking up the most real estate in the public discourse about her art and her health. Over nearly seven minutes, Grande portrays a young woman going through audition after audition in front of a panel of unyielding, hideous, and thoughtlessly cruel old men. She transforms herself into a “Sandy from Grease” type, then a buxom vixen with a prosthetic chest, before ultimately settling on her true self in an off-the-shoulder butter-yellow dress. No matter what she offers these panelists, however, their feedback remains unfair. “There’s something about you. You give off this feeling that’s completely … inauthentic,” one judge tells her. Another asks her if she has a personality disorder. (Perhaps most jarringly, one producer’s note reads, “Couldn’t hurt to lose a few lbs.”) They tell her to go back to who she was. She politely thanks them for their time before chopping them all up with a chain saw, drenching her entire body in their blood.
Grande emerges from the audition to applause from the waiting room of female actresses, each of whom is empowered by her crime. But—twist!—it’s all a scene in a movie, and Grande walks off the set and out to a respectable paparazzi showing, as well as to her adoring fans.
The message of the video is a sequel to what she presented in “Yes, And?,” a kiss-off to critics of her music and her body. But the video is getting so much attention because of, yes, her body! After the first Wicked movie came out in 2024, Grande appeared noticeably thinner than she had during her Positions album cycle in 2020. By the time Wicked: For Good was released in 2025, she was thinner still. These remarkable physical changes, during a time of Ozempic shots and Wegovy pills hawked by celebrities as varied as Serena Williams and John Hodgman, have been impossible to ignore. Everything seems to be driving us—women in particular—toward winnowing. Here’s one of our most prolific, beloved pop stars seemingly suggesting the same, if only by her own example.
The discourse around the “Petal” video is reaching a fever pitch because of an unavoidable fact: Grande is so, so thin. Her thinness is beyond body diversity, and even the expression on her face in the video looks pained. Her thinness is connected to a renewed societal shift toward being skinny, but her self-expression speaks to young girls and women above all else. Regardless of what’s actually going on with Grande—and we may never know—her physicality remains a terrifying example for her audience. In most cases, this kind of weight loss is unhealthy at worst, and not ideal at best.
But no one really wants to say anything about Grande’s body. We don’t learn a lot of lessons as a society, but among her fans, at least, there’s a clear push and pull between allowing Grande bodily autonomy while also aiming to make sense of a triggering appearance. We don’t know if Grande has an eating disorder or is displaying anorexia the way Carpenter was. But in not discussing it, we’re left feeling implicated in a disease that thrives off becoming normalized. By talking about it, however, we’re giving oxygen to an illness that grows off attention and collusion.
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What is left is an unsavory choice for the audience: the complicity of silence or the complicity of judgment.
To witness Grande at work and say nothing—about her remarkable thinness, about the speed of it—is to assist in an ominous performance of normalcy. Grande is thin in a way that merits concern, though concern is not really the place of her audience. The only people who can intervene in a meaningful way are her family, her friends, and her team. All the rest of us can try to do is stay free in our own bodies, in our unnecessary fears of weight gain, while the rest of the world reminds us how available it is to shrink. The hope is that her managers are corralling her offstage to provide her more-focused attention. The hope is that she returns.
Grande’s leave of absence from the public is well timed after two decades of near-constant work. She has been on a set, on a stage, or in a recording booth since she was a teenager. She hasn’t said much about her time as a child star, but few young actors grow into adults without a few scars from their nascent years in the industry. By 2014, when she was 21, she had released her second album, My Everything, and has been steadily touring and releasing albums since. In the 12 intervening years, she made eight albums, went on tour five times, got engaged twice, got divorced once, and had one of the biggest live performances of her career become the site of a mass murder. Now, at 33, she is having her body dissected for being too small (after many years of being told she was somehow too big). If anyone needs a break from being perceived by a mercurial public, it’s her.
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What she does with her time away is up to her, be it treatment or merely a reprieve from the constant din of being Googled and gawked at. But the public—we who have watched her bones protrude and tried mostly to say nothing—have witnessed a profound cultural shift with little cathartic open discussion of how frightening it’s been. The ever-shrinking state of our female icons is a worrying event worsened by our fear of addressing it only to make it lousier. Her body has become a public message, but one we’ve struggled to talk about with any clarity.
Carpenter and Grande have some clear differences, of course. Because Carpenter died from anorexia, her tragic legacy is forever tied to it. Grande is still very much here, and still designing her future. Carpenter’s death brought in a rush of public awareness about anorexia nervosa, entering it into the public lexicon. Grande’s fame arrived after the wretched early aughts, an era in which it seemed as if every young female star was becoming regrettably thin. This time around, we have all the words, the language, the awareness. And still we don’t have much to say except something primal and obvious: Her transition into seemingly her thinnest possible self has been painful to witness. Grande will hopefully get a much-deserved break from us, our expectations, and our incessant—and often unfair—chatter about her. But we’ll get a break too, from a discourse that’ll never yield any winners.
