Grande has spoken openly about the damage she did to her hair with consistently bleaching and dyeing it to play Cat Valentine for four seasons.
"I had to bleach my hair and dye it red every other week for the first four years of playing Cat… as one would assume, that completely destroyed my hair," Grande explained on Facebook in 2014. "I wear it in a ponytail because my actual hair is so broken that it looks absolutely... absurd when I let it down."
"My real hair, which is the humongous, curly, curly poof, is kind of, I don't know … So few people get to see it and it's cute and it reminds me of me as a kid. But so is this," Grande told radio host Zach Sang in November 2020, gesturing to her signature ponytail.
"I wear my ponytail all the time too, but the curls are definitely something that I don't bring around much."