What Ariel Actually Looks Like

I cycled through Disney princesses as a kid—one week Mulan because she was strong and sharp, the next Pocahontas because she seemed genuinely wild, Belle because she read. But Ariel was the baseline, the one that always pulled me back. Red curls, lived underwater, had weird cool friends, refused to stay trapped in one world when another existed. The other princesses were performances. Ariel felt like an actual person.

Fernanda Suarez, a Chilean illustrator, did something I’d wondered about for years: what would these characters actually look like if they were real, if they existed now? Not frozen in a castle at sixteen, but living, walking around in the actual world. The answer is they’d be young and cool and sharp. Ariel especially. Still red-haired, still the most interesting one in the room, the kind of person you’d want to sit with for hours.

It’s weird to see a character you’ve carried in your head since childhood rendered as an actual person. All these years they’ve been frozen, locked in a moment, a style, a world that doesn’t exist. But drawn as someone real—with freckles, with texture, with a life outside the story—something clicks. The illustrator doesn’t need to make them cooler. She just needs to make them real. And Ariel was always cool enough for that.