Goop: The most unusual lifestyle tips from Gwyneth Paltrow's blog

Gwyneth Paltrow's high-end, often ridiculed, lifestyle website Goop is to become a glossy quarterly magazine.

Conde Nast's new title, which will appear in September, will continue the blog's mission to encourage women to "take care of themselves, expensively", as The Guardian puts it.

Paltrow founded Goop, a newsletter which expanded into a website, in 2008, to offer "cutting-edge" health and lifestyle insights – and it certainly lives up to that promise.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In fact, over the years, some of the tips endorsed by the Hollywood actor and her team have made headlines for being utterly bizarre and unachievable.

So here are some of Goop's most eyebrow-raising suggestions as a teaser for what the magazine might have in store.

Jade eggs for your yoni

If you're wondering exactly what we're talking about, it might help to know that "yoni" is a Sanskrit term for the female genitalia.

One recent Goop highlight was an interview with a proponent of "jade eggs", who claimed popping one of these gemstones in your vagina can do everything from toning muscles to increasing libido.

"Before I insert an egg, I’ll do a ritual: I place it on a beautiful piece of fabric, light a candle, maybe even burn some sage," jade egg guru Shiva Rose said. She also helpfully suggested storing your jade egg "on an altar" when not in use.

Vaginal steaming

The idea of inserting a stone egg into your vagina seems positively benign compared to the Goop legend that was vaginal steaming.

In 2015, the website sang the praises of Los Angeles spa Tikkun, which offers women the chance to subject their private parts to a thorough steam clean.

"You sit on what is essentially a mini-throne, and a combination of infrared and mugwort steam cleanses your uterus, et al," the site enthused.

However, medical professionals urged women to "think before straddling the kettle", The Guardian reported at the time, warning that the procedure could leave women vulnerable to infection.

How to make a bed

Considering Goop is best known for creating a byzantine guide to the kookiest aspects of wellbeing, it should come as no a surprise to learn that the website apparently believes its readers are incapable of such mundane tasks as making a bed.

The article contains such gems as "start with top corners and move down to the bottom" and "place whatever blanket you are going to use over the fitted sheet and square it".

This advice, reported Jezebel, was apparently aimed at "a person who has never had to do anything for herself and is just now discovering basic tenets of personal care".

Water can hear your negativity

The queen of Goop herself took to the site in 2014 to solemnly extol the virtues of staying peppy around your Britta filter.

"I have long had Dr [Masaru] Emoto's coffee-table book on how negativity changes the structure of water," Paltrow wrote in a now-deleted newsletter quoted by Vox.

Water poured into vials labelled with negative phrases, like "I hate you", "no longer crystallised under the microscope", she added.

"In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like 'I Love You' or 'Peace' on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals."