Gwenyth Paltrow’s New Controversial Series About Health

Screengrab via Netflix "The Goop Lab" is a short series about Gwenyth attempting to encourage women to purchase expensive products and try out exotic self-care practices, all while promoting pseudoscience to its audience.

Melissa Curran

Assistant Social Media Manager

All I knew about Gwenyth Paltrow before watching The Goop Lab was that she was married to the lead singer of Coldplay, Chris Martin, who was in Iron Man and has a skincare company that charges $148 for a face cream that is probably just as decent as the Walmart Equate beauty brand.

In case you haven’t seen anything trending online, Paltrow recently released a docu-series on Netflix called The Goop Lab.

It’s pretty much just six extremely bizarre and unentertaining episodes of her employees getting paid to experience strange things.

And these strange things push the envelope when it comes to health and wellness in Paltrow’s mind.

But if I’m being completely honest, she pretty much just makes herself out to be an eccentric, privileged hippy over the course of six episodes.

So, if you enjoy listening to people with stereotypical Southern-California accents and outlooks who most likely complain about the barista not putting oat milk in their matcha lattes, this show is right up your alley!

In episode one titled “The Healing Trip”, Paltrow sent some of her employees to Jamaica to experience “psychedelic psychotherapy” where they apparently released a “gamut of intense emotions”.

Intense emotions? Really? The whole episode was just them laying on the ground in a circle, rolling around while making strange cooing noises and sweating profusely.

Big whoop they drank some psychedelic mushroom tea and got high.

By episode two I realized how much I had a strong dislike for about 75% of the employees featured in The Goop Lab.

I don’t care to see six of them prancing around in the snow in revealing bikinis while doing yoga complaining about the cold.

Did I ever think I would see ten different vaginas on my TV screen? No. Do I want to see ten different vaginas on my TV screen? Absolutely not.

In episode three titled, “The Pleasure is Ours”, Paltrow discusses how important she thinks it is for women to be in touch with their sexuality.

I do believe that this is an issue that should be discussed, but I don’t think that the way they excused it in this episode was necessary.

I didn’t realize that the series was rated MA until this episode. It began with a few women from the Goop staff (or as Paltrow calls them, “goopers”) sitting in a circle all completely nude.

Then a sex educator guided women into an orgasm. And they filmed it. Although they didn’t actually show the woman’s vagina while it was happening, they showed everything else. It made me very uncomfortable.

Episodes 4-6 were pretty eh. A few of the goop staff got weird facials, but they were nothing monumental or out of the ordinary.

Paltrow got a facial that was made from her own blood, but she’s late to joining the band-wagon considering Kim K got her first vampire facial a few years ago.

Then they brought in a chiropractor who uses energy fields to “heal” people, and I found this the most interesting part of the entire series.

It did look like he was giving one of the staff members an exorcism at one point, but would it be The Goop Lab if it didn’t include a weird exorcism-like scene?

For the final episode, Paltrow brought in a psychic. The episode was heavily focused on a staff member who was extremely skeptical and a “non-believer”.

I don’t think including this episode was necessary to the series as a whole, it seemed way too normal for Paltrow to be behind.

All in all, this show is completely horrible, a definite skip in the Netflix library. To watch The Goop Lab willingly, I think you’d either have to be a fan of Paltrow and her nutty ideas about health and wellness or just very, very, bored.

It’s not worth taking the time to watch when there are other riveting and delightful docu-series available to watch on Netflix.

Email Melissa at: 

mcurran9@live.esu.edu