Ariana Grande tears up recalling using Botox and fillers in the past: 'I just felt like hiding' (2024)

Ariana Grande is opening up about previously using makeup and fillers as a way to mask her insecurities.

The 30-year-old singer and actor recently teamed up with Vogue for a skin care routine and makeup tutorial video. While going through each step, Grande became emotional as she reflected on how she would “disguise” parts of herself in the past with hair, makeup and cosmetic procedures.

“I feel like my relationship to beauty has changed so much over the years,” she said. “Especially because I started so young.”

Before becoming a pop superstar, Grande performed in musicals on Broadway and also starred on the Nickelodeon shows “Victorious” and “Sam & Cat.” When she was a teenager, she was influenced by those around her who had opinions about her physical appearance, she said.

“It’s, like, really hard to know what’s worth hearing or not, but, you know, when you’re 17, you don’t know that yet. I, over the years, used makeup as a disguise or as something to hide behind and more and more and more hair … thicker the eyeliner, the whatever,” she revealed.

Although Grande still admires her signature makeup looks from the past, she now has a different mindset when she gets dolled up. She also launched her R.E.M. Beauty makeup line in November 2021.

“I think of it as self expression now and accentuating what is here,” the “Thank U, Next” singer explained. “Our relationships to beauty are so personal. Like, we’re here talking about beauty secrets. Isn’t the secret that we all just want to feel our best and be loved?”

After applying some mascara, Grande moved onto her lips for the next step in her tutorial. She said she wanted to be completely honest with her fans and shared that she has altered the shape of her lips in the past.

“(I’ve) had a ton of lip filler over the years and Botox,” she said. “ I stopped in 2018 because I just felt so… too much.”

She started to tear up and added, “I just felt like hiding, you know. Didn’t expect to get emotional.”

Grande said her self-esteem has changed since she stopped getting fillers and Botox, but she isn’t ruling out having cosmetic procedures in the future.

“To each their own. Whatever makes you feel beautiful, I do support,” she told her fans.

She continued, “I know for me, I was just like ‘Oh, I want to see my well-earned cry lines and smile lines. I hope my smile lines get deeper and deeper. And I laugh more and more.’ And I just think aging … it can be such a beautiful thing.”

Grande laughed and added that she might get a facelift in 10 years, pointing out that cosmetic surgeries are also beauty secrets.

At the end of the nearly 12-minute video, Grande was satisfied with her look. She described it as “pretty in pink” with a touch of dramatic cat-eye eyeliner.

“We had a little therapy session in the middle,” she concluded, laughing. “Talked about beauty inside and out and I’m just sending everyone so much love.”

Grande has been busy filming the movie adaptation of “Wicked” for the past year, but she has taken time to share candid videos with her fans about her health struggles.

In April, she uploaded a video to TikTok that addressed recent concerns about her body.

“I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies, no matter what,” she said at the time. “There are ways to compliment someone or to ignore something that you see that you don’t like that I think we should help each other work towards.”

In one particularly vulnerable moment from the clip, she revealed that she has had health problems.

“I know, personally for me, the body that you’ve been comparing my current body to was the unhealthiest version of my body. I was on a lot of antidepressants and drinking on them and eating poorly and at the lowest point of my life when I looked the way you consider my healthy. But that, in fact, wasn’t my healthy,” she shared.

She reminded her fans that they never know what someone else is going through, so it is important to be kind to others and themselves.

Grande ended the clip with an uplifting message: “I think you’re beautiful no matter what you’re going through, no matter what weight, no matter how you like to do your makeup these days, no matter what cosmetic procedures you’ve had or not.”