Ariana Grande’s ponytail sounds painful

Fans may finally have an answer as to why Ariana Grande recently switched up her signature high ponytail: the hairstyle sounds seriously painful.

“With ponytails, it’s all about the placement. The higher you go, the fiercer it looks. The lower you go, the more professional or serious it looks. It can change the whole shape of your face,” Grande’s hairstylist Chris Appleton told Popsugar. “It can snatch your face upward and lift your eyes, or it can pull your eyes down.”

Ouch!

Still, Appleton insists the slicked-back style is worth the potential discomfort.

“If you have never been snatched, you have not lived,” the stylist, who’s also the man behind Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez’s long locks, explained.

“A snatched ponytail is such an iconic look, but there are so many things you can do with it — you can pull it up high or low or half-down. Ariana’s done a great job of showing that off.”

The 25-year-old pop star has favored the high ponytail since her days acting on Nickelodeon, and has said that years spent bleaching and dyeing her hair for her role left her with few styling alternatives.

“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.”

Four years later, Grande has started experimenting with other looks, and wore her hair long and loose — or, as Appleton might say, “unsnatched” — for both her British Vogue cover shoot in July and Monday night’s MTV VMAs.