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Goop is coming to TV. We must be reaching peak Paltrow

Actor and controversial lifestyle blogger Gwyneth Paltrow is coming to a TV screen near you.

Actor and controversial lifestyle blogger Gwyneth Paltrow is coming to a TV screen near you. Photo: Getty

Goop, the equally lauded and lampooned lifestyle and wellness enterprise founded a decade ago by actor Gwyneth Paltrow, is expanding its empire with a new Netflix docu-series.

The as-yet-untitled series, set to air in late 2019, will follow the Oscar-winning mum-of-two as she works with the website’s editors and content creators working with experts to tackle subjects around women’s physical, mental and spiritual health.

The move is just the latest expansion for Paltrow, 46, and her team, whose Goop podcast – featuring conversations with experts and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey – has just nailed an exclusive partnership with Delta Air Lines.

Throw in best-selling healthy cookbooks, Goop’s own magazine publishing imprint, pop-up shops, product lines and a $US650-$US2000 ($920-$2825) a ticket summit series featuring a vegan shoe pop-up, gluten-free desserts, chakra-cleansing and the star’s famous friends like Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Miranda Kerr as speakers, and it would seem we have reached the age of peak Paltrow.

While the tremendous success of Netflix’s Tidying Up With Marie Kondo has shown a hunger in the market for how-to-live TV programming, Paltrow’s guide to a better life goes well beyond closet cleaning and clever folding – often with controversial results.

The site’s lifestyle recommendations include “grounding” – the website claims walking barefoot could cure insomnia and depression – and “vaginal steaming”, which has been debunked by some doctors as dangerous.

In 2018, the company had to pay $US145,000 ($205,000) in civil penalties after a California judge said that it was “misleading advertising” to say that its jade eggs improved sexual health. It also got into trouble for claiming that healing stickers made of spacesuit material were endorsed by NASA.

Another Goop-endorsed must-have for the pampered bohemian includes Psychic Vampire Repellent (“Spray around the aura to protect from psychic attack and emotional harm” reads the handy How to Use Guide).

The Goop Christmas gift guide has become an annual insight into how the cashed-up cool crowd intend to blow their loot.

Last year, the list included a subsection for the “Ridiculous but Awesome” gifts including a $135 matchbox, $800 incense holder, $140 marble dumbbell and a village in Lugo, Spain, for $244,320.

“Be honest,” reads the copy. “This is why you’re here in the first place.”

This self-referential nod to haters is partly what has helped Paltrow take Goop to the next level.

As a personality she knows she’s polarising, from her over-the-top 1999 Oscar acceptance speech (for Shakespeare in Love) to her “conscious uncoupling” from singer Chris Martin in 2014.

“I know it’s a dorky term, but it’s very worthwhile,” she told Net-a-Porter’s online magazine, The Edit, in 2017.

“I’m always the person who gets s–t at first, but then later people say, ‘Hey, maybe that’s a good idea’. I don’t mind.”

Her conversion to healthy eating after her father Bruce died in 1998 “was the beginning of people thinking I was a crackpot”, she told The Wall Street Journal in December.

“Like, ‘What do you mean food can affect your health, you f—ing psycho?’ I remember when I started doing yoga and people were like, ‘What is yoga? She’s a witch. She’s a freak’.”

After being named the World’s Most Hated Celebrity by a tabloid magazine in 2013, Paltrow responded: “I remember being like: ‘Really? More than, like, Chris Brown?’” in a 2016 BBC TV interview, referencing the rapper who famously beat up his then-girlfriend Rihanna.

“Me? Really? Wow. It was also the same week I was People’s Most Beautiful Woman. For a minute I was like: ‘Wait, I don’t understand. Am I hated to the bone or am I the world’s most beautiful?’”

Right now, like it or not, Paltrow is among the world’s most powerful.

With Goop “we’re doing something important. We’re iconoclasts and trailblazers”, she told Marie Claire in October.

“You can love it or hate it, but we’re building something that’s changing the world, and it’s irrefutable that the world is coming along with us.”

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