Gwyneth Paltrow’s been running her Goop scam for a few years now, despite numerous—and we mean literally so many—examples of why it’s, at best, an expensive wellness-themed waste of time, and a legitimately life-threatening pseudoscience con job at worst. Unfortunately, mountains of evidence haven’t seemed to stem her profit margins too much, since we’re staring down The Goop Lab miniseries premiere next week on Netflix.
While online public reaction appears to still fall largely into the “Oh, Hell No” camp, we still should probably take a moment and reflect on Goop’s utter nonsense at least once more—particularly the fact that we crossed over from amusing ridiculousness to “sincere danger to societal wellbeing” a while ago. There’s been a few videos making the rounds over the past week or so reiterating in greater detail just why Goop is so goddamn dumb, but YouTuber Unnatural Vegan has laid out one of the best analyses of how awful Gwyneth’s whole endeavor really is:
The key to Goop and similar brands’ unfortunate success, the video notes, is their expertise at “promoting endless illness,” and making their customers believe there’s always something else that could be healed/fixed/cleansed/inserted inside you (with solutions that Goop coincidentally sells at outrageous prices on their web store).
Unnatural Vegan’s video is also careful to note that Goop’s appeal is often rooted in very real issues within our society—particularly, the marginalization of women’s voices on issues relating to their own body. The solutions to these systemic problems, however, don’t reside in a $75 candle that smells like Gwyneth Paltrow’s lady parts, a product so absolutely awful and insane that it has already warranted its own Snopes article.
In short, please don’t watch The Goop Lab, even if your plan is to merciless mock it. Don’t fuel the vagina-scented fire, folks.
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