Gwyneth Paltrow speaks at Fast Company with Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop at FC/LA: A Meeting Of The Most Creative Minds on May 16, 2017 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Fast Company)
Gwyneth Paltrow continues to build her Goop empire, launching her new quarterly magazine with Conde Nast on September 8 and opening her first brick-and-mortar store, Goop Lab, in the upscale Brentwood Country Mart in Los Angeles last week.
In taking Goop to the next level, with $15 million in venture capital funding, the Academy Award-winning actress turned “wellness” entrepreneur has lashed out at critics who say she promotes sham science with her “alternative” health products, from bee-sting facials to vaginal steaming to $66 jade eggs that women can insert into their vaginas to promote sexual health and energy.
But Paltrow isn’t letting the critics get to her, including an effort by Truth in Advertising to get California regulators to investigate Goop for making false health claims on its website, the Hollywood Reporter said.
“I’m interested in criticism based on fact, not on projections,” she told the Reporter. In other words, she said, “If you want to (expletive) with me, bring your A game.”
Paltrow also isn’t stopping her empire-building with a magazine or boutique shop — which caters to other wealthy women who can afford $90 eye cream, $595 plain white turtlenecks, or $895 black party pumps the actress has created in partnership with Christian Louboutin. Goop world will be going international and one day include a line of spas and hotels.
In the meantime, the Guardian sent a reporter to check out Paltrow’s new shop in the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex created from an old red barn in a neighborhood that’s filled with other celebrities.
According writer Rory Carroll, Goop Lab is airy, bright and small with soft music and smiling, white-clad staff — “a physical embodiment of the online store that inspires devotion for Paltrow’s vision of wellness.”
“It’s all been choreographed by GP,” store manager Heather Taylor told Carroll, using a term of affection for her boss. “All the products are clean. They have nothing that could be harmful to the body.”
The shop consists of small sections — kitchen, living and apothecary areas — where “guests,” as customers are called, can browse for Goop and other sanctioned health, beauty, cooking and clothing products that adhere to Paltrow’s vision of the good life.
During the Guardian’s visit, all Goop’s guests were slender white women — like Paltrow — who checked out the $56 Portuguese napkin rings with images of sky blue swallows, the $180 champagne flutes or $795 floral dresses.
In the “apothecary” area, they could also check out $38 jars of “Sex Dust,” touted as “a lusty edible formula alchemized to ignite and excite sexy energy in and out of the bedroom.” Then there were $30 bottles of “psychic vampire repellent,” comprising “sonically tuned gem elixirs.”
But Carroll said he didn’t see for sale any of Goop’s notorious jade eggs, which Goop marketing copy has said are similar to those used by Chinese “queens and concubines” of antiquity to help them stay “in shape for their emperors.”
San Francisco gynecologist and medical blogger Jennifer Gunter has expertly blasted Goop for making claims about its eggs and other health products, saying the site dispenses “fact-deficient and potentially harmful” health information.
On the “psychic vampire repellent,” Gunter recently wrote: “The psychic vampire repellent may not be FDA evaluated, but who cares when it has sonically tuned water, moonlight, love, reiki, and gem elixirs which is totally not left over water from a rock polisher.”
She continued, “One should spray it around one’s face to ‘safeguard’ one’s aura and ‘banish bad vibes (and shield you from the people who may be causing them).’ I mean that’s some potent, women empowering health (expletive) right there, you know? Just don’t empower it into your lungs.”
Meanwhile, Paltrow can hope that new Goop Lab won’t suffer the same fate as Goop Mrkt, a pop-up store designed to look like a swanky home that she opened in Columbus Circle in New York City in December 2015.
A few days after a star-studded opening party, which included guests like Drew Barrymore and Mario Batali, three men looted the store of more than $173,000 worth of diamond jewelry and other merchandise, the Huffington Post reported at the time.
