Hey, Gwyneth Paltrow's Trending, Let's Make Fun of goop
Friends, what is there to say about Gwyneth Paltrow and her “self-help empire,” goop, that hasn’t already been said?
Nothin’. But we said an hour and a half of stuff anyway.
A 2016 civil lawsuit came to a close last week, confirming that Ms. Paltrow is, indeed, not liable for injuries sustained by Terry Sanderson during a ski collision. The jury found that it was Sanderson, not Paltrow, who was at fault for the collision, and Paltrow was awarded her requested $1 in damages (plus attorney fees).
Was the verdict correct? Probably. But the media circus was a reminder of why Gwyneth is emblematic of the near-pathological lack of perspective we see in celebrities. With the words, “Well, I lost a half-day of skiing,” she reawakened our morbid fascination with her and her at-best-goofy-at-worst-harmful rich people life hacks.
So what’s goop? The website’s About section puts it in beautifully vague terms: “In 2008, Gwyneth Paltrow launched goop from her kitchen as a homespun weekly newsletter. It’s grown a lot since then. We operate from a place of curiosity and nonjudgment, and we start hard conversations, crack open taboos, and look for connection and resonance everywhere we can find it. We don’t mind being the tip of the spear—in short, we go first so you don’t have to.”
If you were to ask Gwyneth, she’d probably say something like, “It’s a holistic, mind-body integrated self improvement hub where you can heal your soul through the earth and also our products.” Products that, by the way, are prohibitively expensive to anyone living in the real world. Think $100 for an exfoliating night cream, $70 for SPF 30 “cellular protection” sunscreen, $3,500 for a 24k gold vibrator. You get the idea.
But Gwyneth doesn’t stop at marketing rich-person novelties and status symbols. She also has a team of editors creating some of the most absurd content on the internet. The highlights of goop’s pseudoscience garbage can be found in listicles basically everywhere, but I read Olivia three of my favorites—ending with the final blow to her microbiologist background. Here’s what I covered, but tune in to hear Olivia’s soul leave her body a couple dozen times.
Have chronic pain? Inflammation? Just feeling kinda tired? You could be short an electron or two. Earthing, also called Grounding, is the deeply complex practice of… uh… walking barefoot on the ground. The idea is that allowing the “infinite electrons” in the Earth to flow into you through the soles of your feet will “neutralize any electrical charge in your body” and take care of those pesky free radicals damaging your cells. (If it needs to be said, standing on the ground won’t cure your chronic illnesses. This is pseudoscience and cannot treat, uh, anything).
This is more of an endorsement than a goop-made product, but the idea is that these stickers are “pre-programmed to an ideal” energy frequency that will “target imbalances” in your body. Whatever that means. They say these stickers will calm your emotions, release stress, and “fill in deficiencies in your reserves.” According to the BODYVIBES site, they use a proprietary technology to “record” frequencies and store them in the sticker the same way you’d “save a file to your computer’s hard drive.” Then it starts “broadcasting” those frequencies when you stick it to your skin. They also say that the stickers contain “NO chemicals,” but that they’re made with “carbon-based, radio frequency material originally developed by NASA” for early spacesuits. (No it wasn’t by the way, NASA already addressed this and debunked it). You can’t buy these anymore, thank goodness, but they used to be $120 for a pack. *Sigh*
This is the one that ruined Olivia. In a nutshell, a “naturopathic healer” calling herself a doctor, Linda Lancaster, believes that everyone has at least one parasite running around in their bodies (though she defines a parasite as any living thing that invades the body, which would include bacteria). Her cure? An eight-day (ideally raw!!) goat milk cleanse with anti-parasitic herbs mixed in. Why? Because parasites love milk, of course. The parasites come out of their hiding places to drink the milk, eat the anti-parasitic herbs, and die. Hooray! This one is a wild ride, folks. Be sure to read with a tin foil hat on to protect yourself. Oh, also, don’t drink unpasteurized goat milk. Ew.