rundown
Ariana Grande has gone back to brunette after years of keeping her hair blonde for her role in Wicked. She unveiled a new chocolate brown shade on Instagram. The changes were made weeks before the premiere of Wicked: For Good and ahead of Grande’s 2026 Eternal Sunshine Tour.
Ariana Grande went back to brunette after years of being blonde to play Glinda in Wicked.
The singer debuted her hair makeover on Instagram, sharing a mirror selfie of her curly new shiny brown hair. She used one of Glinda’s lines in the caption. “You’re happy to meet me, aren’t you? 🫧”
She tagged her longtime colorist, Francesco de Chiara, and herself acknowledged the change by reposting the selfie on her Instagram Stories. He wrote, “She’s here 🥰❤️❤️.”
The switch will end a three-year stretch as the blonde, which Grande first went on to play Glinda in the two-part Wicked movie in 2022. “Even though I wore a wig, I also had to go blonde,” Grande told Vogue in 2024, explaining that lightening her hair helped her “find Glinda.”
Throughout the Wicked press cycle, her color ranged between icy platinum and warm golden yellow, and she was often styled in a high ponytail or updo. But in Wicked: For Good, which premieres on November 21st, her return to brunette looks like a symbolic move closer to that chapter.
The timing also coincides with Grande’s return to pop music. This fall, she announced that she will embark on her Eternal Sunshine Tour next summer, her first major tour since 2019. The tour begins June 6, 2026 in Oakland, California, and continues through early September in London.
Grande is scheduled to perform her album “Eternal Sunshine.” Wicked inspired her to make music again, and the work itself motivated her to tour. As she said on the Shut Up Evan podcast earlier this month, “Something inside me says I have to do it, and I’m grateful for that, because I wouldn’t have said that about touring a long time ago. But you know, I’m just being open and honest about how I feel about these things in real time and following my impulses creatively. You know, they just scream, and we’re there.”
“I think by releasing Deluxe (the version of Eternal Sunshine), I felt like I would be really sad if I didn’t sing this album live, so I thought I had to do it. I love this album so much that I had to sing it. “I think it’s going to be a really special experience for me and my fans, and I think it’s really beautiful to rethink our relationship with touring in this baby-step way. And it’s not — I mean, this probably won’t happen for long,” she admitted. One more time after this.
“Still, it’s something healing and it’s going to be something really beautiful, just like this album. I think it’s going to be a great next step and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to meet the fans. So here’s how it happened and why it happened.”
