From the very moment Goop was incepted by Gwyneth Paltrow in September of 2008, it was the most Gwyneth Paltrow thing she ever did. Steeped in pretension and nebulousness, Paltrow has recommended everything from conscious uncoupling (still worse than the Katy Perry/Orlando Bloom-coined “respectful, loving space“) to vaginal steaming. And now, far long after she should have thought twice before even founding the “lifestyle newsletter” (yet another thing Lena Dunham has ripped off from someone), Paltrow has decided to distance herself from the entity by actually acknowledging what a lot of hooey it is.
While on Jimmy Kimmel Live!–though who knows for what reason as she hasn’t had a film to promote since the disaster that was 2015’s Mortdecai–Paltrow continued to attempt detaching herself from the website by remarking, “My dream is that one day no one would remember that I have anything to do with it. How can I separate myself from the brand?” Considering Goop is as grandiloquent as Paltrow herself, the answer to her question is: there’s no way to. Unfortunately, she strayed too far from even her most iconic role as Margot Tenenbaum, which at least lent her some cachet in terms of having a slight edge. Now, she’ll forever be associated with being the wellness advocating celebrity who told legions of followers to go into infrared saunas, get colonics on the regular (but who wants to further stretch out their asshole, to be honest?) and eat fermented foods.
Rather than biting the hand that has fed her (and her strangely named children) for so long and so well by saying, “So, earthing—I don’t actually know that much about earthing… They say that we lost touch with sort of being barefoot in the earth, and there’s some sort of electromagnetic thing that we’re missing. It’s good to take your shoes off in the grass… I don’t know what the fuck we talk about!,” perhaps Paltrow ought to simply embrace the brand she has created for herself. Because, at this point, no one wants to her smoking or having sex with, well, anyone. She surrendered Margot too readily to deserve getting that persona back.
