Ariana Grande has had enough of strangers talking about her appearance, and for that matter, everyone else’s too.
In a joint interview with Grande and Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo published Thursday, a French content creator who goes by the online handle “Crazy Sally” asked Grande how a good witch deals with trolls.
Grande seemed taken by surprise by the question, and choked up with emotion briefly before answering.
“I’ve been doing this in front of the public and been a specimen in a Petri dish, really, since I was 16 or 17,” she said of hearing criticism about herself throughout the years. “I have heard it all. I’ve heard every version of it, of what’s wrong with me, and then you fix it, and then it’s wrong for different reasons.”
“It’s hard to protect yourself from that noise,” she said.
And then Glinda shared some words to live by, for all of us.
“It’s something that is uncomfortable no matter what scale you’re experiencing it on, even if you go to Thanksgiving dinner and someone’s granny says, ‘Oh my god, you look skinnier, what happened?’ or ‘you look heavier, what happened?’ That is something that is uncomfortable and horrible no matter where it is happening, no matter the scale it’s happening on, and I think in today’s society there’s a comfortability that we shouldn’t have at all commenting on others’ looks [and] appearance, what they think is going on behind the scenes or their health or how they present themselves. From what you’re wearing to your body to your fave to everything, there’s a comfortability that people have commenting on that that I think is really dangerous, and it’s dangerous for all parties involved.”
This isn’t the first time Grande has spoken out about struggling with beauty standards and public opinion: In a 2023 video for Vogue showing off her makeup routine, she got emotional while talking about her past use of fillers and Botox, which she said she stopped using in 2018. “I just felt like hiding, you know?”
Her relationship with the idea of beauty has changed over the years, she told Vogue, “especially since I started so young.”
“I over the years used makeup as a disguise or as something to hide behind—more and more and more hair, and more and more and more thicker the eyeliner, the whatever,” she said. “I still have love for it and appreciation for it, but I think as I get older, I don’t love that being the intention behind it anymore.”
As Grande concluded her answer in the Crazy Sally interview, she drew a breath and ended on a cathartic joke: “Can you tell I needed that today?”
