Is Mariah Carey turning 47 or 48 today? We try to get to the bottom of it. (GIF: Getty Images/Yahoo Celebrity)

Champagne wishes to Mariah Carey on her birthday — only she doesn’t celebrate. “I don’t have a birthday,” she said in an interview last year. “I was just dropped here. It was a fairyland experience.” The star, who has described herself as “eternally 12 years old,” previously explained that her plan is to remain “oblivious to age. Honestly, when you put a number on it yourself, it’s just like, Why? Why do that?”

The diva’s elusiveness about her big day only adds to the mystery surrounding it. Yes, mystery. One of the Internet’s most enduring burning questions is: Was Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1969 or 1970? And people have opinions on the matter, which you can read in revision notes on Mariah’s Wikipedia page and in fan forums. As we started digging into it, we found info to support both years, making it easy to understand why the Lambily — Mariah’s fans — have been debating it so intensely.

View photos Not even Mariah Carey’s Wikipedia page has the answer. (Screenshot: Wikipedia) More

From what we can decipher, when the “Elusive Chanteuse” — who graduated from Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, N.Y., in 1987 — launched her career (her self-entitled album came out in June 1990), press material must have indicated she was born in 1970, because that is what the New York Times — and other outlets — noted at the time. In an interview on Video Soul soon after her record came out, she said as much. Mariah told Donnie Simpson she was 20 when the record came out, and 19 when she recorded it. (The fact that she stumbled during her response, seen here at the 2:37 mark, only fuels conspiracy theories.)

However, by January 1991, other reputable outlets — such as People magazine and the Los Angeles Times — were going with a 1969 birth year. (The latter used it in a headline: “Mariah Carey Doing OK at 21,” so they were pretty confident they were correct.) Even her hometown paper, Newsday, referred to her as 21 in an article that ran on March 19 of that year, and they had obtained a copy of her senior yearbook and interviewed the vice principal at her school. (Fun fact: Some of Mariah’s likes in 1987 included Corvettes and “guidos.”)

View photos Here’s Mariah as a freshman at Harborfields High School in 1984. (Photo: Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library) More

Mariah has fueled the debate herself by avoiding dropping a specific number. At a 2005 party celebrating the release of the Emancipation of Mimi — and her 35th (or 36th) birthday — she didn’t give her actual age, instead telling reporters, “It’s the anniversary of my 12th birthday.” And at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, someone asked her how she was feeling about turning 40 earlier that year (going with the 1969 birth year). She implied the reporter was incorrect, saying, “Read my bio again. We can’t allow these lies to spread! Don’t say the f-word around me. It’s just a number, but I don’t see why women should have to conform to what is expected of a 40-year-old — whatever that is.”

If you really dig into Mariah Birthday-gate (and we went down that rabbit hole), there is a statement purportedly from a People magazine spokesperson floating around the Internet “verifying” that the star is a 1969 baby, made in response to fans inquiries about the conflicting information. “We have a copy of Ms. Carey’s driver’s license, which lists her birthday as March 27, 1969. Furthermore, we spoke with the administrators at the high school she attended who confirmed that Ms. Carey’s birthday is March 27, 1969, as did her management when we made our initial interview,” a magazine publicist supposedly said, according to NNDB.com. We were unable to find such a statement on People‘s website — not that it didn’t exist (it could have been in print, because they didn’t have website in the early ’90s) — and the publicity team for the magazine tells Yahoo “it doesn’t sound familiar at all.” (Despite this, the magazine has steadily reported that she was born in 1969 through the years — from here to here.)