It appears that something very strange happened on the set of “Wicked 2.”

Stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have shrunken to a very small size at the same time. It’s a concerning example for girls and young women — and a reminder that there’s a real social contagion when it comes to extreme weight loss.

As “super skinny” comes back into fashion in the era of Ozempic, it’s incumbent on parents and society to fight a resurgence of unrealistic standards and disordered eating before things get out of hand.

Photos and videos of Erivo and Grande looking incredibly thin have circulated the internet. And it seems to be no coincidence that two female stars shrunk in unison.

We don’t know, of course, what’s going on with the actresses. But their photos are everywhere on social media right now, and we’ve long known that eating disorders can be “contagious.” Not in the traditional sense; this is social contagion.

A study of sororities from the 1980s revealed that disordered eating clustered within different houses, while a study of more than 15,000 high school students in 2008 found that it pops up in groups across the country.

In the age of social media, this is especially concerning.

Girls’ mental health has already been battered enough by these platforms. Now, social media is rife with the message that thin is in.

Y2K fashion is back and, unfortunately, so are the associated beauty standards. Earlier this year, the UK’s Association of Standards in Advertising banned ads from three major retailers, including Zara, because they models appeared too thin.

Everywhere you look, celebrities from Kelly Osbourne to Meghan Trainor to Amy Schumer are shrinking, be it due to weight-loss drugs or something else. The era of body positivity seems to be resoundingly over, and teens are taking note. 

Young women have been flooding TikTok with #SkinnyTok content — teaching one another how to slim down and skip meals. While the platform banned the hashtag earlier this year, the content has proven impossible to stifle.

“Skinni tokk” is the new scrambled algorithmic hack to get around such bans, and just searching the word “thin” opens the floodgates of unhealthy content.

Thinfluencers are scolding girls and doling out advice like, “You don’t need that piece of bread out of the bread basket. It’s not free if it’s costing you goals.”

Once you stumble upon this content, it inevitably gets served up in your feed again, and again, and again.

And severe eating disorders causing hospitalization are on the rise among youth since the pandemic. This was a generation who grew up online, was locked down during critical years, and is now being bombarded with unrealistic beauty standards and toxic advice.

The social contagion of eating disorders has digitized and exported en masse.

For her part, Grande took to Instagram to reshare a clip from a 2024 interview as a “loving reminder” to those with comments about her appearance.

“I’ve been kind of doing this in front of the public and kind of been a specimen in a petri dish really since I was 16 or 17, so I have heard it all,” Grande said. “I’ve heard every version of it, of what’s wrong with me. And then you fix it, and then it’s wrong for different reasons.”

Of course, her weight is her business. But she’s making a point that applies to girls everywhere: Unrealistic standards imposed when you’re young can have lasting impacts on your body image.

There’s little parents can do to control beauty standards, but they can do one thing. Follow the advice of experts and keep kids off social media until at least high school.

A girl deserves to have her body develop before she’s pummeled online with a million things that are wrong with it.