Ariana Grande shows off natural curly hair on Instagram

Ariana Grande may be known for her waist-grazing ponytail, but her real hair is much shorter.

The pop star, 26, rarely gives fans a glimpse of what’s beneath her extensions but showed off her natural hair on her Instagram stories on Monday. Though she kept her hair up in a small pony, she appears to have bangs to accompany the shoulder-grazing curls.

She previously showed off her real hair in February, when it was visibly shorter, and compared the look to a photo of her 5-year-old self with a remarkably similar hairstyle.

The painful pony may be her signature, but it was born out of necessity after years of dyeing and straightening her hair while on Nickelodeon’s “Victorious” severely damaged the singer’s locks. “That completely destroyed my hair,” Grande wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post in 2014. “I wear it in a pony tail [sic] because my actual hair is so broken that it looks absolutely ratchet and absurd when I let it down.”

Grande’s look — including her hair, long sweaters worn as a dress and thigh-high boots — have become so recognizable that she is a popular Halloween costume and even has look-a-like imposters on TikTok.