Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop think

Does anyone know who Gwyneth Paltrow is? Well, yes. We know the broad strokes of her personality and history – the awards, the Hollywood upbringing, the movie star boyfriends and rock star husband, the wellness empire, the much-memed ski trial – but what’s underneath the smooth surface of her being? Gwyneth, a new biography by Amy Odell – a veteran celebrity journalist who previously cracked the facade of Anna Wintour – hopes to find out.

Meticulously researched (Odell spoke to 220 people from Gwyneth’s extended universe) and forensic in detail, it centres on one of the biggest controversies of GP’s – as she’s known round her office – career. In 2017, her wellbeing website, Goop, recommended the yoni egg, a semiprecious stone meant to be inserted into the vagina to promote sensuality and healing. The medical establishment was appalled; the media delighted to have another scandal. GP was unrepentant. She simply showed up at the office the next day, parked her white Range Rover in her designated parking spot (marked “Reserved for G-Spot”) and doubled down. The egg sold out.

As an illustration of Paltrow’s character, you couldn’t find a story more perfect. Charismatic, ambitious and deeply strange, GP always seems to come up smelling of (organic) roses: one of her earliest Vogue profiles was simply headlined “The Luckiest Girl Alive”. A polarising thoroughbred raised in a world of privilege, Gwyneth Paltrow has never been normal.

From an early age, in fact, “the idea of ‘being normal’ became both a fear and a fascination” to her, Odell writes. Today, celebrities prize the nebulous concept of “relatability” above all else, but Paltrow has never managed to be relatable. Her most famous quotes are those that poke fun at this – she once told an interviewer she would “rather smoke crack than eat cheese out of a can”. Her popularity with us, the viewer, the reader, the consumer, relies on this dual fascination: we might hate her, but we still want to be her. She optimised her own life, then she sold it back to us. But not everyone can be Gwyneth Paltrow.

A nepo baby before there were nepo babies, Paltrow’s childhood was rarefied. She called Steven Spielberg “Uncle Morty” and attended an exclusive private school alongside international royalty and the American elite. From an early age, Paltrow was what you might call “crunchy” – a self-confessed hippy. Later, her rigid beliefs on wellness, diet and exercise would bloom into a full-blown, albeit deeply lucrative, disorder. As a teenager, her biggest fear was listed in her yearbook as simply “obesity”.

By her 30s, Paltow had run the gamut of movie stardom: winning an Oscar, surviving Harvey Weinstein, calling off an engagement to Brad Pitt, marrying Coldplay’s Chris Martin and enduring various film controversies (her “romcom” Shallow Hal was criticised for being fatphobic even by the punishing standards of the early 00s). Smarting from a series of flops, she withdrew from the acting world and gave the world Goop: a clean-eating, vagina-inserting juggernaut that has profoundly influenced the multibillion-dollar wellness industry we know today.

As Odell writes, GP “was an early adopter when it came to any trend”. Such trends include: raw milk, yoga, Spanx, subscription-based media models, online newsletters, living in Montecito, clean eating, strange baby names, coconut water, Kabbalah, cryotherapy, cupping, IV drips, threading, intimacy coaches and the healing power of crystals.

She’s made herself rich doing it. Launched in 2008 (the simultaneous global financial crash earned Paltrow comparisons to Marie Antoinette), Goop accumulated 150,000 newsletter subscribers in less than a year. Acting as a proto-Instagram, the site gave us “a window into a certain elitism. And people couldn’t look away.” By 2020, the company employed more than 250 people and was valued at $250m.

Five years on, with the badass girlboss era of the 2010s long gone, Goop’s stratospheric rise is slowing – and perhaps even faltering. Once a novelty in the marketplace, today there are Goops everywhere. The same wellness pseudoscience once mocked as the preserve of out-of-touch celebrities is now mainstream, propagated by figures such as RFK Jr. Today, almost every famous actor, singer or model has their own brand, from Kim Kardashian’s shapewear label SKIMS to Selena Gomez’s make-up line Rare Beauty.

As a study of not just celebrity but the media landscape itself, Odell’s book is fascinating, but unfinished. Paltrow’s chameleonic life story is not over – she is soon to appear in her first major film role in at least a decade – nor is her hold on the media. Despite Goop being fined $145,000 for claims about its efficacy, the yoni egg is still for sale on the company’s website, next to gold necklaces that hide tiny vibrators inside. It’s no longer selling out. Gwyneth Paltrow basically created the wellness economy, but it no longer rules us. Today, we live in an attention economy instead, where tradwives and online influencers competing for headlines outstrip Goop’s curated rage-bait on a daily basis. GP’s next chapter will be navigating that economy too.

Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell is published by Atlantic (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Daniel Leal / AFP via Getty