Margaux AnboubaFor a weird few years in the 2010s, celebrities went from being unknowable paragons of glamour to being Just Like Us. They were expected to masquerade as the unwashed masses and enjoy it, to prefer sweatpants over the archival pulls provided for them by payrolled stylists, to flee the caviar and champagne at the Academy Awards and get their chauffeur to drive them to In-N-Out Burger. All in all, celebrities were expected to pretend that their lives were pretty much the same as ours, give or take a few boring red carpets.
Gwyneth Paltrow has never pretended. The daughter of a lauded stage actress and a television producer, she grew up in immense financial privilege and spent her toddler years hanging out with Hollywood legends as they rehearsed productions of The Seagull. At Spence, the private Manhattan girls’ school where she studied with Princesses Alexandra and Olga of Greece, she and her friends would bicker over whose parents were more famous. At the age of 18, she was cast in Hook by her beloved godfather, Steven Spielberg.
She went on to become one of the century’s most famous actresses, winning an Oscar at the age of 26 and dating the princes of the profession, Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck. After stepping back from cinema, she founded Goop, her controversial wellness brand, which popularised such things as burning vagina-scented candles and shoving jade eggs into your unmentionables. This is to say: Gwyneth Paltrow exists atop a Hollywood Olympus, living in the rarefied air of lifelong celebrity and occasionally sending down scripture in the form of a newsletter declaring that we all have ‘insidious yeast infections’.
99.9% of Paltrow’s life is completely foreign to 99.9% of people, and for her to act as if it were not would be disingenuous. As she so incisively put it: ‘I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.’
This, I think, is why we find ourselves slap bang in the middle of a glorious Gwynaissance. A major movie comeback in Marty Supreme has seen La Paltrow cover Vanity Fair and British Vogue. The film, in which she plays an old Hollywood actress making a comeback of her own, won her a respectable amount of Oscar buzz and saw her return to the press circuit after a number of years. But this time, the complete absence of relatability that once saw her derided by the public reads, I would argue, as genuineness.
During a disarmingly charming interview on the Good Hang podcast, host Amy Poehler described her as ‘someone who’s keeping an eye out and figuring out if there’s a better way to do things.’ Paltrow agreed, explaining that she’s always been figuring out how ‘to improve yourself, to feel contentment, to reduce inflammation, to be a better partner, to be a better divorce… person…’
Earlier in her career, she put it slightly differently: ‘It’s so much easier to sit home and not exercise and criticise other people,’ Paltrow said. ‘What I love is inspiring people.’ So, to celebrate the fact that GP is back in our lives, I decided to get out of the house, start exercising, and follow her critically-reviewed wellness routines. I spent a week living like Gwyneth Paltrow. I gagged down bone broth, I slept in hotel suites, and I pretended to be someone who makes $10 million a year. Here’s what I learnt.
My week as Gwyneth Paltrow began with what can only be described as a physical and mental aegon against a heaped teaspoon of coconut oil. I woke up at 6:30 am and immediately shoved the stuff in my mouth, greeting the morning with a wretch. Oil pulling, described by Goop as ‘the Ayurvedic oral-health practice of swishing oil in your mouth to get rid of excess ama, or buildup,’ feels more like a form of Ayurvedic torture. The semi-solid clot of coconut melts in your mouth, leaving you with a noxious blend of spit and plastic-tasting fluid, which occasionally drips down your oesophagus when you succumb to the urge to swallow. Gwyneth does this for 20 minutes every morning. Not only is the process incredibly boring (mute, I was forced to communicate via whiteboard or muffled grunts), but it also results in a pretty nasty spasm of the buccinator muscles.
Finally, I spat the mixture out and immediately scraped it off my tongue with a tongue scraper. This second part of Gwyneth’s oral routine is said to reduce bacteria and prevent bad breath, but I swiftly realised that my tongue scraper is not made from copper, like hers, but from some other idiotic transition metal, and that it probably not only lacked ayurvedic benefits but was also coating my tongue in the kind of forever chemicals that will be lingering in the atoms that once comprised my liver as they float pathetically across the heat death of the universe. I considered binning the whole endeavour, quitting my job, and sitting on the floor until that time should come, but I decided that’s not what Gwyneth would do, so I picked myself up and got on the Tube.
It had been a rather stressful morning. Fortunately, I had downloaded ‘Moments of Space’, the AI-powered meditation app co-founded by the actress, which encourages users to indulge in ‘eyes-open’ meditation as part of their daily routine. My video, guided by GP herself, asked the listener to stare straight ahead and become aware of the empty space surrounding the objects in front of them, thus becoming aware ‘of the space of your own awareness.’ This is, no doubt, a wonderful exercise when performed while looking out onto the vistas of Montecito, but it is a little less relaxing when the consciousness of your own awareness is comforted with an advert for male pattern baldness as the Northern Line rattles its way from Kennington to Waterloo.
Amandine Lhoste
Calin Van Paris
Alexis Parker
