The courage of Gwyneth Paltrow


I can hardly believe how brave she is. Would you believe she actually sells psychic vampire repellent?

If it were me, I’d be afraid to stock something that would repel or destroy me, and I sure wouldn’t be selling it to people, not even for an outrageous $30 for 100ml, who might spritz me with it. Especially not when it’s been infused with such dangerous things as moonlight and reiki.

The psychic vampire repellent may not be FDA evaluated, but who cares when it has sonically tuned water, moonlight, love, reiki, and gem elixirs which is totally not left over water from a rock polisher. It must be very potent as there is a double dose of reiki. I’m not sure how they get all that reiki in the bottle because reiki isn’t an object but no conversation needed here because ancient gem elixir physics, duh! One should spray it around one’s face to “safeguard” one’s aura and “banish bad vibes (and shield you from the people who may be causing them).” I mean that’s some potent, women empowering health shit right there, you know? Just don’t empower it into your lungs.

I’m assuming that Psychic Vampires are real, because no way would Gwyneth sell a fake remedy to a fake problem. That would be, like, a double-fake. Which confuses me, because wouldn’t a double-fake mean it’s real?

Also, it’s obvious that Gwyneth herself is a psychic vampire. She’s leeching the minds out of people.

Comments

  1. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    I’m sure it’s her “team” that just slap her name on it for endorsement cred. Gwyneth is too “nice” to commission the team to sell her conconction for her? Who would do that?
    Oh wait…sheesh

  2. says

    My my, with ingredients like moonlight and love, it’s sure to work! Much better vampire repellents than say, garlic.

    My first not quite awake glance at the image left me a bit nonplussed, because I have spray bottles exactly like that, with nice labels on, containing liquid dyes. You wouldn’t want to spray them on your face.

  3. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    I can guarantee you that if you spray that on your body, you won’t be attacked by psychic vampires (or any other kind of vampires, for that matter).

    Hell, all you have to do is think about spraying it, and you’re protected for life.

    My inner evil genius is now concocting some foolproof get-rich-quick schemes.

  4. Mobius says

    Excuse me. Moonlight? I thought vampires LOVED moonlight. If it were true vampire repellent it would have sunlight, and plenty of it.

  5. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Re “sonically tuned” @4:
    There was a fad a few years ago about “tuning” water by exposing various samples to different frequencies and the “psychic” was able to sort them by frequency.
    Uhm …yeah

  6. says

    Reading the whole article, I was appalled to see that Ms. Paltrow would eschew leech treatment because leeches are living creatues, but she was okay with live bee acupuncture. Oh sure, what’s a little bee slaughter? It’s not like they’re important or anything. Fuck’s sake.

  7. blf says

    Note that the list of ingredients on the pictured bottle doesn’t match the list on website; e.g., moonlight, sound waves, and love aren’t on the bottle. I presume this is so the FTC(?) cannot come down on them with a metric shitetonne of bricks for false labeling; the bottle’s listed woo-woo sonically tuned… and reiki charged…, whilst bullshite, isn’t impossible and is perhaps difficult to challenge. (E.g., don’t be mislead by the fact there is no such thing as reiki, they could claim / show someone mumbles something over the ingredients whilst waving a wand to argue the ingredient is reiki charged — analogous to homeopathetic woo-woo.)

    I actually peeked at the site to see how this scam is supposed to be used: Shake gently before each use. Spray around the aura to protect from psychic attack and emotional harm. Avoid contact with eyes. Do not ingest or inhale. Aura! Oh for feck’s sake. I assume they mean your own aura and not the psychic vampire’s. (I didn’t look to see if the scammers had some means of locating anyones aura.)

    Actually, the site gives two importantly different set of instructions: The “detailed” one quoted (in full) above, and a shorter version, Fans spray generously around their heads to safeguard their auras. (I don’t think they mean fans as in air-circulating machines.) Notice an important difference: No warnings about avoiding the eyes, not ingesting, and not inhaling. Despite application near the head.

  8. raven says

    Also, it’s obvious that Gwyneth herself is a psychic vampire. She’s leeching the minds out of people.

    She is a real vampire!!!
    A financial vampire.
    Bleeding the money out of people’s bank accounts one scam bottle of fake medicine at a time.

    But not a very powerful financial vampire. There is a defense.
    “A fool and their money are soon parted.”
    Gwyneth Paltrow is a predator specializing in…fools.

  9. says

    I wonder how much involvement Paltrow actually has. I assume relatively little. Usually these deals are some form of “let us use your name and you get stock in the start-up” (worked pretty well for Doctor Dre and George Foreman, not so well for Trump) It must be nice, as Ray Wylie Hubbard says, “now, my job is to walk down to the mailbox…”

  10. blf says

    I wonder how much involvement Paltrow actually has.

    This nonsense seems to be another company’s product, PaperCraneApothecary (yes that how’s they spell it (teh goop site inserts spaces)). There seems to be a lot more stuff from those scammers then teh goop frauds are selling. From a quick browse of the site much of it is similar nonsense (albeit the psychic vampire repellent is perhaps the silliest).

    However, one item concerns me, kick the habit, described as an addiction relief elixir. Whilst they include the Quack Miranda Warning, I’m concerned some gullible fools will try to use this stuff to treat their addition. Addiction to anything, apparently, going by the webpage.

    It’s €15.53 plus another €11.07 for shipping (I’m in France) for 2oz (for feck’s sake, if you give me prices in euros than how about also using metric measurements!). Needless to say, that ain’t gonna work, unless emptying your wallet is an addiction you want to have.

    I have no idea how one is supposed to use it — there are no instructions that I can find — but since it’s called an exlir I assume one is supposed to drink it. Other then the before-mentioned warning, there are no obvious usage-warnings at the site.

    As noted previously, the ingredients list at the site and on the pictured bottle don’t match, in the same suspicious manner: Only the site lists, e.g., love. And this “alcohol free” (sensible given the alleged purpose) stuff can be personalised: If you would like, you can tell me if there is a specific issue that you are dealing with, and I will happily bless your elixir with a specific intention just for you. I assume personalisation costs extra.

    I wonder what would happen if I said my issue was “woo-woo & fecking stooopid scams, like your products”?

  11. drken says

    I think she’s pretty brave considering the amount of mockery she gets for this sort of stuff. What I am questioning is her judgement (or morality).

  12. jerthebarbarian says

    She’s leeching the minds out of people.

    Feh. That would be work. This Goop stuff she’s doing is sheer grift of the old-school snake oil salesman type. Except instead of having to drive your Traveling Medicine Show to a new part of the country where nobody has heard of you and find new suckers to fleece, you set up a site on the Internet and let the suckers come to you!

    And since you’re leveraging the law of large numbers, you no longer have to worry about bad word of mouth killing your business like the old snake oil hucksters did. You advertise to tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of people very cheaply. If even 1% of them buy your stuff, that’s hundreds of thousands of people giving you money.

    It’s literally the laziest way to make money. And after watching Paltrow talk about this stuff I’m convinced she’s the biggest mark in the whole scam. She actually seems to think this stuff is real and she’s helping people with it. I will not be surprised at all to watch the whole Goop business collapse one day and the people she trusted with the finances all off living on some island with no extradition to the US for financial crimes.

  13. Trip Space-Parasite says

    If it contains moonlight and love, it must work by making you smell like Sailor Moon. Most of her enemies could be described as psychic vampires, and she always triumphs over them.

  14. Gregory Greenwood says

    But what about non-psychic vampires, huh? The Undead traditionalists who just go straight for the throat fangs bared, with none of this new age, vampire-vegan feeding on psychic energy malarkey? What is Gweneth going to do about them? And then there’s werewolves. And ghouls, trolls, goblins rakshashas, succubi, changelings and all manner of apparently not-at-all-fictional-honest-governor monster type critters. What good is being protected against the most milquetoast of vampires if any person-chomper that isn’t put off by actual blood can make a meal of you? Talk about an incomplete product range…

  15. Gregory Greenwood says

    And now for the most important question of all – forget vampires, psychic or otherwise, as an actual threat because, you know, they don’t exist (sorry Gweneth). The real question is will this stuff stop Hollywood making any more terrible vampire movies, and authors writing any more awful vampire fiction, especially ensuring that a certain franchise known for annoyingly sparkly bloodsuckers stays well and truly dead and buried?

    If it could do that, it might be worth something.

  16. Rich Woods says

    I tried the psychic vampire repellent and all it did was make me sparkle.

    Aren’t modern beliefs wonderful? “Now, my pretty, come here and expose your gorgeous, pulsating neck to my bite. No, don’t bother removing the crucifix. Thanks to a century of social change it doesn’t work on my kind anymore.”

  17. Colin J says

    It’s a great product. You only have to buy it once – you never have to use it. If the vampires are psychic then they are going to know you’ve got it and avoid you. At $30, that’s great value.

    jerthebarbarian @17:

    And after watching Paltrow talk about this stuff I’m convinced she’s the biggest mark in the whole scam. She actually seems to think this stuff is real and she’s helping people with it.

    You do know that she’s a professional actor, right?

  18. says

    Colin J @23 said: You do know that she’s a professional actor, right?

    Or to put it another way: she’s a member of a profession which is governed entirely by appearances, where public perception is everything, and where your employability rests on the most flimsy foundation known to humanity. A profession where all the employment is temporary short-term contracts, and where all the participants are subject to hiring and firing on purely subjective criteria. Where the wage gap is not only immediate and obvious, but where a person’s employable lifetime is strictly governed by their age and gender (and at 44, poor Gwennie is reaching the end of her working lifetime in Hollywood: “Goop” is probably her plan for future income). Basically, it’s a profession which is practically a “how to do it” recipe for generating overly-anxious, neurotic types – and that’s even before you consider the types of people who go in for acting in the first place…

    (Oh, and back on topic, the best repellent for “psychic vampires” I’ve run across is demanding they do something practical about their blasted problems, and not offering to help them.)

  19. blf says

    There may be a goop tv show, Goop on loop: Gwyneth Paltrow has her sights on a ‘radical wellness’ TV show:

    The purveyor of $956 loo roll wants to get out into the field and bring the spirit of her lifestyle brand onto our television sets

    [hellip;] Gwyneth is eyeing an expansion into TV. What we are thinking of doing, she tells the Hollywood Reporter, is a TV show with the working title The Radical Wellness Show. This would see Gwyneth do what she calls going into the field, and talking to doctors and scientists. Some real, presumably, and some the sort of doctors who pop up on Goop to tell you to cleanse your body in goat’s milk to ward off parasites. Anyhow, the example given by Gwyneth is people in the crisis in Flint, Michigan, where there is something to uncover and confront about wellness.

    I’m not quite sure the disgraceful failings of government agencies in Flint should be classed as a “wellness” issue. I mean, the city’s government is facing a welter of lawsuits and investigations, a citywide state of emergency was declared, people won’t be able to drink the unfiltered water until at least 2020, elevated blood lead levels have been found in the children, there was a spike in cases of legionnaires’ disease, and various criminal cases and class action lawsuits are pending.

    Suggesting it’s a wellness issue makes it sound as if they’ve run out of spa robes and disposable slippers. Then again, don’t forget that Gwyneth once announced: I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee-table book on how negativity changes the structure of water. […]

    The people in Flint do not need quacks or actors shoving microphones up their noses until they agree to buy overpriced gem elixirs (water) made with sound waves.