Looking back! Ariana Grande is getting real about the past makeup looks she used to wear all the time.
“Me to old me, ‘Who wouldn’t dare be seen without a thick cat eye and an overdrawn lip?’” the “7 Rings” songstress, 29, captioned a Saturday, June 3, TikTok video via her R.E.M. Beauty page as she applied the brand’s eyeliner.
As Grande — who debuted her beauty brand in 2021 — applied her cosmetics, she lip-synched to a Keeping Up With the Kardashians clip. “Do you think your eyes are a little too smoky for every day?” the Wicked actress mimicked Kourtney Kardashian’s question to her mother, Kris Jenner.
Jenner, 67, replied: “Yeah, I’m going through a phase. Is that OK with you?”
Grande — who previously enlisted the Safely founder to make a cameo in her “Thank U, Next” music video — rose to fame as a child actress before landing the role of Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon’s Victorious and her Sam & Cat spinoff. Amid her TV success, the Florida native started pursuing a music career, as well. Despite her rise to the top of the pop charts, the Grammy winner was eager to show off her passion for beauty with her R.E.M. launch.
“Covering the secret for the past two years and having testers and samplers in my purse and people asking me, ‘Oh, I love your highlight, what are you wearing?’ And me being like, ‘I don’t know, sweating,’” Grande recalled to Allure in an October 2021 cover story. “It was so hard to keep a secret for this long.”
R.E.M. Beauty’s first collection focused on the eyes, which she told the outlet are “our main gateways to our dream, our emotions, our everything.”
“They’re our main storytellers and sources of communication,” the former Voice mentor said at the time. “I feel like you can emote more with your eyes that you can articulate sometimes.”
Amid the brand’s success, Grande faced criticism from music fans, accusing her of putting her music on the back burner. The “Positions” artist quickly shut down the claims.
“I have actually never felt more at home in my voice or like more of a singer,” Grande replied via Instagram comment in July 2022.
The Broadway veteran has currently been using her singing skills in the highly anticipated film adaptation of Wicked, in which she stars as Galinda opposite Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba. Grande even used her makeup prowess to find the good witch’s signature style.
“Glinda wears a couple of things,” she teased to her TikTok followers in April, when asked if her bewitching character wears R.E.M. products. “I told my beautiful makeup artist, Nuria, who I love with all my heart, I said, ‘I don’t want to go into this with any sort of rules or requests. I want us to find her from the ground up. I wanted to sit down and let you play and we’ll find her together.’”
