(CNN) — On Sunday, Ariana Grande announced that she “will be taking a step back from visibility,” suspending her future appearances after her current summer tour ends. The pop star had just released the music video for her latest single, “Petal,” which showed her always petite frame ridged with shadows of the bones of her chest. Fans, critics and consumers of celebrity news responded with a chorus of dismay or alarm.
The announcement, delivered by her representative in an exclusive to People magazine, is unlikely to stop the discourse about her thinness and health, which has been going on in one form or another since the singer, now 33 years old, was a teenager — and, for other people in the public eye, far longer than that.
Then, on Monday in Chicago, Grande addressed her previous statement, saying that the idea of stepping away from public life was long-planned.
A representative for Grande declined to offer further comment.
No one outside Ariana Grande’s personal circle knows the reason, if any, that she appears to have lost weight. Her health is private; her image is visible everywhere. The space between those two premises is filled with speculation, and with arguments about whether it’s right or wrong to speculate.
What is the audience’s business? What is it culpable for? It’s been 43 years now since the platinum-selling singer Karen Carpenter died at the age of 32 of heart failure brought on by anorexia and bulimia. Fans by the thousands had watched her dwindle away over the years.
“Just how delicate she was became painfully clear by the mid-’70s, when audiences watched her wither away before their eyes,” James Gavin wrote for the New York Times in 2010 as he reviewed the biography “Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter” by Randy L. Schmidt. “Karen suffered from what were then mysterious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia, and she was slowly starving herself to death.”
“I don’t think her illness was handled properly,” her brother and bandmate Richard Carpenter said in a CBS interview in 2022, while promoting the book “Carpenters: The Musical Legacy,” which he had coauthored. Richard Carpenter, who developed an addiction to Quaaludes under the strain of stardom, said he had made peace with his past except when it comes to his sister’s death.
But then it’s only been six years since the press and public got caught up in a frenzy of gossip and guesswork about Chadwick Boseman’s appearance in an April 2020 Instagram video for Jackie Robinson Day — focusing not on the charitable initiative the Black Panther star was announcing, but on how suddenly skinny he looked. Had he lost weight for a role? Was he on drugs? Was he ill?
All was answered months later when Boseman died at the age of 43 and it was revealed that he had been privately getting treatment for colon cancer since 2016. People on mass media and social media alike then condemned what they viewed as the body shaming of the beloved star.
“The fact that Boseman had been criticized for his weight loss speaks to how superficially most people view others when their sole basis for judgment is the images they see online,” Kelly Coffey, a personal trainer and health coach, told Business Insider at the time.
People have been reading ideas about weight and image into Grande throughout her career. In 2013, when she was 19, Grande wrote on Tumblr that while she didn’t “usually like to address rumors,” she “felt like since some of you are worrying about me that I should take the time to write you all a little note to address this whole ‘eating disorder thing’.”
The teenager went on: “I lost a bit of weight last year. It’s because I stopped eating junk food and started making healthy choices. I was happy with the way I was before and I’m still happy now! Just healthier! But the lifestyle change I chose to make last August is not and was never about being skinnier. I just wasn’t taking care of myself at all.”
Ten years later, she again let her boundaries be known by posting a video on her verified TikTok account.
“I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies, no matter what,” she said. “If you think you’re saying something good or well-intentioned, whatever it is, healthy, unhealthy, big, small, this, that, sexy, nonsense…we just should really work towards not doing that as much.”
But Grande’s body was still being packaged for the public to look at, as part of her job. There was even more concern in 2025 when she and her “Wicked: For Good” costar Cynthia Erivo became fodder for debate over how thin they both appeared during the promotional tour for the film.
Oona Hanson, a parent coach who specializes in eating disorders, said at the time in an interview with CNN that some parents were so concerned about the issues that they had reached out to her.
“Regardless of what the actual medical or health status is of these actresses, which we don’t know, the ultra-thin images, I think, are very painful and can be triggering to someone who has, let’s say, seen their child become emaciated from an eating disorder,” Hanson said. “Or they know their child was looking at images that look a lot like these press tour photos.”
Grande’s Eternal Sunshine Tour, scheduled to end in London on September 1, and her “Petal” video provided even more images for consideration. “WHAT YOU SEE HERE IS NOT NORMAL,” the eating-disorder recovery advocate Charli Howard wrote on Instagram to accompany stills of the “Petal” video.
Howard wrote, “I think it’s vital we discuss imagery/videos/content like these and the damage they can — and will — have on women and girls.”
“This poor woman is possibly dying right in front of us. This outfit is designed to accentuate the thinness for discourse,” the actress Jameela Jamil wrote in the comments. “Her team are thoroughly irresponsible for not guiding her away from this deeply damaging image for her young fans to see so glamorized.”
That “possibly” in Jamil’s comment served as an acknowledgement that no one talking about Grande has access to any underlying truth. The concerns end up pointing in multiple directions at once: at Grande’s own hypothetical vulnerability, at Grande’s responsibility for supposed effects on her fans, at how glamorous the images are, at how appalling the images are.
Now, for a while, there will be fewer images to work with. Grande has decided to cancel her planned role in the West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” and to avoid making other public appearances. The announcement did not mention whether or not she will participate in the upcoming publicity tour for her performance with Ben Stiller in “Focker-in-Law,” releasing in November. CNN has reached out to Universal Studios for comment.
The statement from Grande’s representative to People notably avoided saying there was anything wrong with the star herself at all. Her tour, it said, will be ending “healthily and happily.”
Instead, the statement said, she was turning away from “endless, ongoing public scrutiny.”
The-CNN-Wire
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