Behold! Gwyneth Paltrow’s new retail store, which she calls Goop Lab.
The store, called Goop Lab, opened this week in Brentwood Country Mart, a cluster of boutiques in a plush, celebrity-filled neighbourhood near the Pacific Ocean which likes to call malls “marts”.
The shop is airy, bright and small, just 1,300 sq feet, with soft music and smiling, white-clad staff – a physical embodiment of the online store that inspires devotion for Paltrow’s vision of wellness and scorn for products such as jade stones which women are invited to insert into their vaginas.
Crap. Her ‘lab’ is bigger than mine. Much tidier, too. I’m also missing out on a profit opportunity here.
The entrance, which mimics a garden, offers “buttery and soft” deerskin gloves for $48, gold-handled floral scissors for $72 and the “prettiest compost bin ever” for $175.
Further inside, you find a pair of Portuguese napkin rings with images of sky blue swallows for $56 and a champagne flute for $180. A silk blouse costs $685; a floral dress $795.
Probably the first thing you’d see in Myers Lab is a cable rack draped with years of accumulated wires and connectors, some of them antique and artisanal. I should slap some pricetags on them.
On the left, the interior is dominated by a large cattle trough which is used as a reservoir for the flow through water system for the fish tanks. Imagine you hear the lowing of well-groomed happy cows, and the burbling of a brook running through the field. That is the ambience we are going for.
I have nothing to compare with the “prettiest compost bin ever”, unfortunately. I do have some chemical waste disposal containers, though — maybe I should spruce them up with a cheery sprig of heather, and sprinkle some sapphires about the bench.
At least I have some tiny, delicate iris scissors that were a heck of a lot pricier than her floral scissors. How déclassé of her.
You’re assuming that “lab” is short for “laboratory”. My guess is it’s from the Latin “labes”, meaning a collapse, subsidence, stain, spot, blemish or disgrace.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0060:entry=labes
Can’t see the difference between this stuff and what Alex Jones is peddling. Maybe there is something to the horseshoe theory after all :)
– RM
Is it really tiny? That actually seems a reasonable price for a compost bin, so I figure something must be off with it considering the $72 scissors.
Deerskin gloves for $48 seems like a good buy.
At least two problems: (1) The deer very probably object; and (2) This is woo-woo central, there is no reason to believe anything — Assuming the product even exists, its far more likely to be a bad drawing of a Neanderthal eating a dinosaur, with the caption
Do we get to try the jade eggs before we buy?
Whaddya mean new age woo ? This stuff has some serious science behind it !
” All Paper Crane Apothecary products come with a variety of intuitively selected gem stones, which have been sonically tuned in a crystal singing bowl and blessed with Reiki.”
I think I sense a lucrative business opportinity – here’ how we make the stuff:
You should have a calm and focused emotional state while making crystal essences because strong emotions can affect the elixir.
Cover a cleansed quartz crystal with spring, distilled or bottled water in a clear glass bowl and place in full sunlight for two to three hours.
It is important that you minimize direct physical contact with the crystals and water to prevent the crystal energy from absorbing your own energy and affecting the elixir.
Remove the stones with a spoon.
Pour the charged water, mother essence or stock, into a dark glass bottle, blue or brown works well.
Mix with an equal amount of pure vodka of at least 40% alcohol (US 80 proof) which will act as a preservative and also help to “fix” the vibration. Seal the bottle. Vinegar can be used as a substitute for the alcohol.
Carefully decant small amounts of the mother crystal essence into a smaller dark glass bottle with a dropper.
Just because you’re a pile of decomposing organic matter doesn’t mean you can’t look stylish.
“Goop Lab” surely this is how the owner would describe their large(-ish) dog with chronic diarrhoea?
LykeX @9
:^) ;^) ;^)
OTOH, if it’s “pretty,” then it ain’t much of a compost bin, IMNSHO.
fusilier
James 2:24
For me this is the tray of decomposing shit taken out to be buried.
But whatever.
@ajbjasus #8:
Which orifice should I cleanse my quartz crystal in? Need I take both latitude and time of year into account when calculating solar exposure, or is it sufficient to simply reference longitude as and when I feel like it?
All such critical details aside, I am with you on the vodka!
Before I retired I used to carry out safety inspections, on their pressurised systems, for Imperial College. I was asked once to inspect all the autoclaves in a new laboratory complex prior to it opening. I was struck by how clean, neat and tidy the labs were before they allowed the researchers near them. I went back a year later to re-validate the equipment ……..