First edition of Goop sends you for a loop

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This article was published 30/09/2017 (3213 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The debut print version of Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s living-your-best-life blog, hit newsstands last week. Glossy and slender, like Paltrow herself, this collectible quarterly magazine retails for a whopping $16.99.

First off, full disclosure, I took the back-page “How Goopy Are You?” quiz and got the “you’re just not that into us” score. With my stubborn affection for evidence-based science, I often find Paltrow’s take on wellness vexing and/or silly.

Goop started off nine years ago on the internet, where its passing parade of aspirational lifestyle tips, gorgeous images, magical thinking and Christmas gift lists involving gold-plated juicers felt right at home.

Somehow, the many contradictions of the whole Goop project — and its love-her/hate-her founder — seem much trickier in hardcopy form. Here are just a few:

Gwyneth, she’s just like us: “She will unapologetically, if occasionally, reach for french fries,” a Paltrow profile piece by writer Sarah Mesle points out, reassuringly.

Gwyneth, she’s not like us: “On an overcast Friday morning this past July, while most of New York was hot and listless, Gwyneth Paltrow was in a downtown photo studio having her face painted with a mask made from snail secretions.”

So, yeah, as with many celebrity-centred mags, that all-girls-together tone — we all have to get dressed in the morning, we all have to get dinner on the table tonight — becomes somewhat strained when you start reading about Celine bags and $780 sneakers and doing the school run in Stella McCartney.

Paltrow knows what we’re thinking:

Recently, Goop HQ made a big pitch for Body Vibes, wearable stickers that claim to “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies,” adding that they were “made with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits.” Unfortunately, those PhD-wielding buzzkills over at NASA fact-checked the site, prompting removal of the attempted astronaut affiliations but not claims to the almost supernatural ability of $10 stickers to clear your skin and allay anxiety.

Paltrow has heard the criticisms. There is, after all, a book called Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash.

She even seems to be having a little fun with her Goop-y, science-lite rep: The magazine’s cover features an image of her almost naked self plastered in (supposedly) healing French clay, with the tagline “Earth to Gwyneth.”

And she’s getting out ahead of that narrative: The magazine says straight up that Goop often highlights “alternative practices that aren’t supported by enough scientific research to satisfy Paltrow’s most ardent detractors.”

Rather than defending many of its pseudoscientific claims, Goop shrewdly boxes in its bringdown critics. If people distrust the notion of “earthing,” for example — the idea that walking barefoot on the ground transfers an eternal, natural energy from the planet through the soles of your feet — that’s not healthy skepticism but the grousing of close-minded no-fun-niks who hate walking in the green grass.

At the same time, perhaps wary of more NASA-style corrections, the magazine often relies on evasive Trumpian phrases like “some people say.” A piece on crystals is a masterpiece of wiggly writing, somehow talking up the mystic powers of citrine and obsidian while avoiding direct assertions that they do anything at all.

She’s monetizing enlightenment: Paltrow declares that she tries so many alternative wellness therapies and beauty treatments because she just wants to “milk the f— out of life.”

She might be milking something else. Goop has a masterly way of wrapping old-fashioned material self-indulgence in New Age spiritualism. It has also closed the loop between editorial content and sponsored merchandise. An article on clean beauty warns that the term “fragrance” can be used as a Trojan horse for all kinds of toxic chemicals, while simultaneously offering up a nice visual of Goop’s pricey new all-natural eau de parfum, conveniently available through the Goop website and packed with vaguely healing properties.

Fun fact: Even hardened skeptics might like Goop’s rebranding of weed as health enhancer, fashion must-have and status symbol, with an article that talks up sleek THC-filled vape pens from Beboe, a company co-founded by “Marc Jacobs’s go-to tattoo artist”(!), as well as premium “single-origin” marijuana from California farms.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca