The economy of the self.

While attention on the internet is fragmented, that fragmentation is so extreme it’s given a disproportionate amount of attention to things that, before we spent most of our lives online, were marginal. This effect is most pronounced in the world of personal health, or, in the parlance of health’s most devoted (and privileged) obsessives, “the wellness movement.” Wellness isn’t just eating right and staying fit. It’s a feeling. It’s a brand. It’s an identity.

The word “wellness” alone is enough to evoke a very particular sort of Pinterest collage—pastel-colored yoga mats, water bottles shaped like anal beads, anal beads shaped like water bottles, CrossFit leaderboards, straps, curved treadmills, ponytails, stubble, protein bars in minimalist wrappers, superfoods, gym makeup, colored steams, etc.—indicative of both the movement’s perversions and pervasions. The internal ideals of wellness are linked, inseparably and intentionally, with the external presentations of wellness. Wellness is about looking good and feeling good so you can project a sense of looking good and feeling good to convince others they also need to aspire to your specific mode of looking good and feeling good. Health motivates survivalists. Wellness recruits disciples.

The symbolic leader of the wellness movement is Gwyneth Paltrow. Her church? Goop, a wellness website/brand disguised under the word “lifestyle” and packed full of dubious advice and nefarious products. Around Goop, Paltrow wraps a ribbon of cozy, playful intimacy that could only be accomplished, and supported, and believed, by 2010s internet culture.

Your body is popular culture now. You’re your own biggest critic, but Gwyneth’s your biggest fan.

“[Goop] is a place where readers can find suggestions about where to shop, eat, and stay from a trusted friend—not from an anonymous, crowd-sourced recommendation engine.” – The Goop website

Goop began in 2008. Back then, it was just a newsletter sent hot and fresh out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s kitchen every week (the Goop site describes it as “homespun”), a collection of its author’s favorite foods, places, and products. The first issue had recipes for banana muffins and turkey ragu.

Within a year, GP (as she would come to be known and referred to among her followers and future staff) and her newsletter gathered 150,000 subscribers, and by 2011, Goop was incorporated. When Goop’s eventual website opened its online store in 2012, it made $1.5 million through its original product line in its first year. Since then, the numbers have become staggering, maybe disturbing: In 2018, Goop was valued at $250 million. The brand has a podcast (650,000 listens per week), a Netflix deal, a website with 2.4 million unique visitors per month, a fashion line, a beauty line, a publishing arm[1][2], and an annual wellness summit that charges attendees $4,500 per ticket. Their headquarters have grown from a barn in Los Angeles to a full-on four-building campus in Santa Monica, currently home to 200 employees. On the whole, Goop’s been as invasive as the jade vaginal eggs it was once sued for selling (more on those later).

At the center of the company’s massive success is GP herself, but the former movie star’s involvement[3] within the company and methodology as an influencer differ widely from her celebrity-mogul brethren. While the Jenners and Kardashians of the world operate their enterprises under the guise of executive decision-making and run their social media accounts on a basis of aspiration and platitudes, GP is—in ways both terrifying and oddly refreshing—nothing but genuine. She loves Goop, and she believes in it, and she’s CEO of the company in every respect. She’s closer to Oprah than any of the influencers who post #ad on Instagram.

Goop’s central figure, then, doesn’t position herself as someone you can be like—she’s too famous and wealthy and public—but rather someone you can be friends with. It’s a subtle difference in dynamic that makes everything about Goop feel much more genuine (because it is—though this is different than being honest, as we’ll see) and much more attainable (although it’s not). Make no mistake: The brand is still very much “aspirational” in a business sense—how else could you describe a relationship of any kind with Paltrow?[4]—but it’s refusal to draw a parallel between GP and its audience works in its favor.

Because Paltrow has intuited that her authority and influence lies in her celebrity. Goop is so bonkers, so wack, so “alternative,” that if GP brought herself down to the level of consumers, the façade would break. That’s why GP will never join Martha Stewart at Macy’s or Chrissy Teigen at Target. She’s not like those other “everywoman” celebrities. She’s Gwyneth Paltrow, maven of high-class health, and from that vantage point, only peasants would have shows on the godforsaken Food Network[5]. Wouldn’t you rather be friends with royalty?

Despite her candid lack of pretense, Paltrow nonetheless leans into the illusionist possibility her readership could know her and know her well. She once said about Goop: “I want to be an additive to your life.” Despite the telling phrasing (where else do you find “additives?”), the quote is reminiscent of = Goop’s mission statement. GP is your “trusted friend,” not a “recommendation engine.” All the company’s tips and recs and referrals are from Paltrow herself.

That means buying into Goop isn’t like buying into a witch doctor or medicine man. Investing in the company is made to look like supporting a friend, and isn’t that worth a little extra money?

“We approach health and wellness from a place of unbiased and open-minded curiosity.”

Goop receives the brunt of its criticism not for Paltrow (though the criticism of her is a natural symptom of this = aspect) but for, well, its general dubiousness. The company’s approach to wellness is, to say the least, “alternative,” and to say the most, complete bullshit.

At the ground level, Goop’s products are even more “wellness-y” than what you’d find at an athleisure boutique or an artisanal soap store. The company’s beauty, fashion, and health product lines skip yoga blocks and dry shampoos in favor of an inventory ranging in function from the luxuriously practical (a 5 oz. bottle of G Tox Fruit Acid Pore Purifying Cleanser: $48) to impractically luxurious (a Rose Quartz Bottle with an embedded crystal inside: $80) to cheekily bemusing (Vesper Vibrator Necklace: $149) to downright terrifying (Psychic Vampire Repellant: $27). Wherever something falls on the Goop spectrum—which seems to start at “expensive but useful” (1.7 oz GoopGlow Microderm Instant Glow Exfoliator: $125) and end at “holy shit” (Chrona Demi Ring, “destined to become an heirloom”: $10,900)—it comes with unbridled endorsement and an aloof presentation. These salespeople don’t even blink.

The prices are jaw-dropping, even enraging, but they’re strategic. They affirm the company’s aspirational leanings, but they also subtly define wellness as a privilege. “Living your best life” or “living your truth[6],” don’t suggest a freedom from material wants or needs but rather an embrace of those external things as solutions to your dissatisfactions. The vicious circle at the heart of wellness, and at the heart of Goop’s business model, is that you can buy your way to your personal definition of the good life. The problem being, of course, that within this dynamic there will always be something beyond your reach to incentivize you to strain a little more.

Only don’t strain too much, because remember: The good life is about not having to strain at all. If you have to break a sweat to afford the One of a Kind Small Round Emerald Necklace ($900), that means you aren’t really living your best life. Keep working at it! And in the meantime, maybe the Pure Bliss jojoba oil ($85) will ease your worries.

An expensive price tag doesn’t make something bad. However, Goop doesn’t justify its prices with any sort of proof the products work. On the contrary, the company’s credentials as a health brand are infamously non-existent.

For starters, Goop specializes in what it calls “functional medicine[7],” what the scientific community calls “alternative medicine,” and what most people in Britain calls “a crock of nonsense.” In the beginning, Goop’s assertions about its various lotions, face masks, vapors, and creams stuck to the abstract. It used emotional language to describe each product, like how a supplement would affect your mood, aura, or essence, but as Goop grew and grew and its marketplace expanded…well, GP and Co. became a little cocky.

In 2018, Goop’s pseudo-science came home to roost[8], and the company was sued for making unsubstantiated claims about the effects of its products, specifically its jade vaginal eggs, which were sold as being able to balance hormones (!), increase bladder control (!!), and regulate menstrual cycles (!!!). Goop also said an essential oil line could, um, “prevent depression.” The lawsuit flung some bad PR in the company’s direction, but ultimately, Goop was no worse for wear. The brand paid out $145,000, but after its $250 million evaluation that same year—and likely even more growth after the subsequent Netflix deal and podcast launch—it was a drop in the bucket of Botanical Shampoo, as it were ($52).

In the wake of the controversy, Goop has repositioned itself not as a leader in the health space, but in fact a boundary-pusher. In an interview with CNN after the lawsuit, Paltrow said: “We didn’t understand you can’t make certain claims. We didn’t understand about compliance and regulations. We just thought we were writing a blog, you know?” Silly us. We must have forgotten: This was just a “homespun” kitchen operation! Who knew you had to think about legal consequences for your irresponsible actions!

Goop doesn’t purport to make claims anymore. Now, the company says they “ask questions,” going to unconventional sources to poke at the conceptions of leading medical experts and scientists. It’s an obvious spin tactic. The company presents what many would call their convenient, financially motivated defiance of the facts as humble, innocent skepticism.

“We value your trust above all else.”

It’s a stance you could only assume with any semblance of confidence on the 2019 internet. The digital landscape is so diverse, so dense with opinions, so segmented and bordered and bubbled, it’s possible for a place like Goop to preserve trust among its core fanbase in the face of mainstream criticism. Falsehoods and cons like godforsaken vaginal eggs become “alternative facts” because internet audiences assign as much legitimacy to someone’s lack of credentials as they do someone’s advanced degrees, certifications, or licenses. People are drawn to Goop because it’s not run by experts, doctors, or lab techs[9]. It’s the absence of those things that, in fact, makes it popular.

Moreover, Goop has legitimacy because it’s run by a rich and famous person, the most trusted kind of person in America. GP is the image of wellness, the literal body of evidence that everything she peddles through her brand works. Her skin glows without blinding you, her hair is photo-ready in any style, her eyes pop, her smile could kill, her sex life is frisky and playful[10], and her energy is (almost literally) bottle-able. Her unflappability and resilience in the face of criticism are now part of her mythos. She’s an archetypal strong woman standing proud amid a culture that has it out for women. She’s a role model, really. She’s everything.

That’s one of the final notes on Goop: It’s popular culture’s second-best example of how we assign more reliability to fame and success than on-paper qualifications or tangible evidence. The best example, of course, is President Trump, whose victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election demonstrated the power of image over resumé, as well as anti-establishment stylings over traditional modes of accreditation. The President has the trust of his base because he keeps established institutions—and in turn, easy labels—at arm’s length. His platform can’t be summarized as Republican, or even conservative, it’s just Trumpian. That’s not a negative for his supporters, either. It’s the whole damn point. People trust Donald Trump because he doesn’t come from the systems designed to engender trust. The same goes with GP, Goop, and the broader array of industries that advise us on how to live healthy, positive lives.

“We have more control over how we express our health than we currently understand.”

The wellness movement is now a $4.2 trillion global industry. That’s not a typo. The movement’s dominance comes from its immense breadth across the human experience, from the food we eat to the showers we take to the fitness classes we join to the sheets we lay under at night. Wellness can be at the center of your entire life if you want (and if you don’t want), and it sells itself on the idea that by being at the center of your life, you can finally have control over everything in your world, chief among all your mind and body.

That’s the preeminent promise of popular culture’s shift to personal culture: control. You don’t have to settle for whatever’s on TV, you can pull up any type of show you want on demand. You don’t have to settle for whatever’s playing tonight at the movie theater, you can stream anything available on Netflix or rent anything on Amazon Prime. You don’t have to comb through a record collection or skip through an album to play a song. You don’t have to wait until a tour to see a comedian. You don’t have to scour a video game’s replay value in the hopes that it will be worth your $60—games never end now—and you don’t have to wait to consume anything, because a TV, music player, comic, fitness coach, food delivery service, and game controller are all in your pocket.

As pop culture responds to a world built upon the internet, it places more and more value on speed, access, and customization. Wellness is the extension of that type of consumption. If people want to control the things they watch, hear, and play, why not sell the illusion of control over how they feel?

The tension lies in life’s randomness, unpredictability, and guaranteed struggle, which mean the fight for control over your feelings is eternal. That reality is how the wellness industry perpetuates itself. That’s how Goop grows from a newsletter to a quarter-billion-dollar company. That’s how GP emerges from her acting cocoon to become your guru, your queen, your best friend. You will always need her advice because wellness says there’s always more you can do for yourself, always another thing to buy, another part of you that needs nourishing, another part of you that—if you just learned these breathing exercises and curled your toes a certain way and adopted this routine—could be just a little bit more optimal for modern living. You’ll never achieve wellness. Wellness is impossible.

Because the secret of personal culture is that once it involves you—and it inevitably will—you will enter the same attention economy that every movie, TV show, website, album, and video game enters. Your profile, your brand, your blog, your entire life is in digital competition with everyone else’s. In today’s world, it feels impossible to command anyone’s attention, and that’s why GP presents herself as not just your counselor or your life coach, but your friend. People love Goop because Goop makes them feel like someone hears them. Goop makes people feel like they’re not anonymous, like they can achieve visibility through these products that will help them stand out. If they can achieve wellness, they’ll be looked at. They’ll finally be seen.

Wellness is the monetization of loneliness and insecurity. It promises empowerment, but all it really provides is dependency. People say GP is just selling placebos; it’s not true. She’s dealing the sickness.

[1] While Paltrow’s three cookbooks have each been successful, they haven’t all garnered critical acclaim. On her second book, 2013’s It’s All Good (Goop-iest title ever), The Atlantic wrote it was a “bible of laughable Hollywood neuroticism.”

[2] Goop’s only significant financial failure came in publishing. In 2017, the company announced a partnership with media giant Conde Nast to create a print magazine. Despite the debut issue featuring a provocative image of Paltrow in a mud bath (coverline: “Earth to Gwyneth”), the magazine lasted only two issues before Conde pulled out of the deal.

[3] Since we won’t have much space to talk about it elsewhere, GP really did have a special run in 1990s Hollywood. She emerged on the scene in David Fincher’s Se7en before knocking out a pair of over-awarded but still solid period romances in Emma and Shakespeare In Love. Then, in 1999 she hit her peak with The Talented Mr. Ripley, but she didn’t fall far from there, appearing in The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001. GP was a great actor! Insane to think that all she had to do to sustain Goop in the 2010s was show up for a couple scenes in each Iron Man movie.

[4] Well, admittedly, some people might think of some alternate descriptions. Part of the world’s fascination with Goop no doubt comes from polarization surrounding GP herself. In 2013, two years into Goop as we know it, Paltrow was voted by the readers of Star magazine (great rag) to be the Most Hated Celebrity in America. While this in isolation doesn’t really matter, it’s a fascinating title for GP to have secured in the context of Goop, which has one of the most loyal audiences in the wellness space and on the internet. Somehow, the Most Hated Celebrity in America is also one of the country’s most trusted public figures, at least in one sense.

[5] Apologies to Ayesha Curry, Ree Drummond, and Rachael Ray.

[6] This phrase is a bit of a sleeping dog, but it’s worth kicking awake here to point out that in context, this phrase implies the truth is different for everyone, a fallacy that’s grown more prominent in the back half of the 2010s and, while presented here as harmless and hyper-tolerant, is also the very thing that enables people in power to twist facts, never apologize, and dodge repentance. Yeah, didn’t expect such a serious take in the footnotes, did you?

[7] On Goop’s “About” page online, the section on wellness reads in part: “While traditional medicine can be really good at saving lives, functional medicine is more adept at tackling issues that are chronic.” This is a really, really careful way of saying you can boost your mood by taking a whiff of a Scented Candle: Edition 04 – Orchard ($72).

[8] There was a near miss earlier. In 2017, Goop was pressured to stop selling “healing stickers” on its website because the company said the stickers were made from material originally developed for NASA. It wasn’t true. The stickers were actually made from a type of polyester called Mylar, which for the stickers was “programmed”—I swear these are quotes—with the ritualistic chanting of Gregorian monks.

[9] Well, almost. After the 2018 lawsuits, Goop hired an in-house lawyer, a resident Ph.D. in nutritional science, and a “director of science and research.”

[10] Fun fact: One of Goop’s earliest moments of virality is when GP used the site to announce her “conscious uncoupling” with Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin. The phrase was just a fancy stand-in for divorce, but it smacked of GP’s sensibility, and the term became a bigger story than the divorce itself. It’s sort of impressive.