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SMAGAZINEOFFICIAL.COM GWYNETH PALTROW
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G wyneth Paltrow’s love of the high-low is legendary. “It’s what makes
life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu,”
she once said. A weekly smoke, a weekly can of Coke—at one point or
another, they’ve found their way into an otherwise pristine routine so
well-documented, it’s been cemented into pop culture and propelled a
wellness empire. When we chat for this story, Paltrow is in Umbria, Italy,
where she’s been celebrating her 52nd birthday with a close-knit group of
friends. And fresh off a weekend of indulgence, she’s feeling better than
ever. “Weirdly, I come to Italy, and I eat pasta and cheese and [drink] wine,
and I actually feel amazing,” she tells me. “I feel like I’m eating some kind
of superfood diet.” Sure, highly regulated European food processing has
something to do with it, but she’s also treating herself to what she truly
wants. “I think pleasure’s really important, and I think being too ascetic
or too strict can be punishing,” she says. “We live in a culture where we’re
supposed to be all these things, which I think I certainly fell prey to for
many years, and I just think that it’s so important to feel good and explore
what that means for each person.”
Pleasure over perfection would be a welcome aphorism for goop’s next
era—since launching as a newsletter in 2008, Paltrow’s brand has explored
everything from vaginal wellness to skincare, psychedelics, cashmere, and
conscious uncoupling, all the while, influencing a generation of women to
be their best selves. Now, she’s dropping new wisdom around self-love. “I
tried to start a practice of acceptance around physical signs of aging when
I was turning 50, and it started as an intellectual kind of thing, like, ‘let’s
try not to say bad things about yourself to yourself,’ ” she says. Slowly but
surely, she’s recoding her nervous system to react differently to old triggers
(the how-to we all need!). “You can sort of decide if you’re going to let
your blood pressure get out of whack by a piece of weird news [or not].
“...I’m a natural Libra, I love beauty, I love the pursuit of feeling beauty in the air, and I think it’s kind of
endemic to who I am, and I find lots
of different ways to express that.”
If you can just slow that down, there’s a lot of wisdom in it,” she says. “I’m
not successful at that all the time, by any means, but I’m definitely getting
better at it.” It’s some of life’s most challenging inner-work, but for Paltrow,
radical self-acceptance is poetic. “It’s hard to explain exactly, but it sort of
feels like this unclenching around it, as if this warm breeze is coming, and
with it comes peace, wrinkles, your inner thighs starting to fall down, and
this deeper acceptance that I haven’t quite ever experienced before.”
Almost two decades into goop, Paltrow’s latest product forays also
reflect a kind of self-assured authenticity you get from a seriously involved
founder. When I ask her about her skincare routine lately, she’s abuzz
about the brand’s latest release, the 3x Retinol Regenerative Serum,
a clean retinol serum that minimizes irritation with collagen-boosting
peptides. “I am not just saying this, I am a total goop beauty devotee,”
she says. “I am so psyched about the retinol, which I’ve been using since
the lab gave me a sample of it.” The serum has made it into her everyday
routine, which also includes sauna, meditation, and dry brushing. “[When
it comes] to treating your body and your skin with good care, there’s a
topical way to do it of course, and our products are really fucking amazing,
but I think that there’s a whole internal part that goes with it as well,”
she says. Goop’s skincare range is newly and exclusively available at Holt
Renfrew in Canada, something that Paltrow has been manifesting for ages.
She discovered the store while in Toronto working on one of her first films
in the ’90s and would visit often. “I must have been like 20 at the time
and I used to go to Holt Renfrew and walk around and just be obsessed,”
she says. “I couldn’t really afford anything at the time, but it’s just such
a perfectly curated store and I was always like, oh my gosh. You know
when you see something when you’re young and it’s sort of emblematic of
luxury? It’s always been that for me.”