Today is Saturday, which is supposed to be my day off, and therefore there will be little or no braining. Instead, let’s see what Gwynnie is up to. (Does anybody like her? Some people must, as she’s gotten rich off her products and surely has a lot of fans).

I’m not one of those fans, as when I see her she always strikes me as insincere, and, more important, she’s now spending her life peddling woo instead of acting, an area where she really does have talent. She is flogging two new products. One is a pack of “Inner Compass Cards”, which come in decks of 49 cards and costs $55: more than a dollar a card. (Let it not be said that her company, Goop prices things fairly.) Click on the screenshot:

Now they’re called “oracle cards”, but that isn’t quite the case. But to see what they really are, you have to read an article in Jezebel by Hazel Cillis, who got a pack (funded by Jezebel), examined them—and used them. Click on the screenshot to read Hazel’s take (note the heading!):

What the cards apparently do is give you a self-helpy thought that will supposedly guide you toward daily fulfillment. Some quotes:

There are 49 cards to a pack of Inner Compass cards, each with a vague nugget of wisdom. “This card is an invitation to drop anchor. Intuitively you feel that something is not quite right, but you are too busy to act upon it,” read the Anchor card’s description. “Now is the time to slow down and take a long, good look around.”The cards are intended, the website reads, to “propose questions that awaken opportunities that have been waiting for you.” So I decided to try and “awaken the opportunities inside me” by offloading my decisions to the cards for a day.

So what do these dollar-apiece cards say?

The directions are basically, “every day shuffle the deck with focus and intention, pick one or more cards instinctively, and your intuition will guide you toward a new pattern of belief and positivity,” the website reads. You can’t pick a wrong card. In the morning I shuffled the deck and pulled a card: The Healer. I flipped through the little book of explanations to find mine. “You are currently going through a process of deep healing,” it began. I was told to shed “everything that distracted me,” to “open myself to change,” to “rise out of the mud like a lotus flower with increased empathy, understanding, and wisdom.” This was redundant, considering that among the Jezebel staff it’s already widely known that I’m a lotus flower who has already risen out of the mud with an increased empathy, understanding, and wisdom. Was I comforted by this apt assessment? Not really.

They’re more like horoscopes than Chinese fortune-cookie slips, but of course they’re all bullshit. As Cillis says,

The thing that sets Inner Compass cards apart from a Tarot deck, is that the latter anticipates the future. Inner Compass cards do something much lazier: they don’t predict, they just give a pep talk. They’re billed as “oracle cards,” a category that can become whatever you want it to be, as long as you’re thinking about “your intentions” while you pick a card. That looseness also means that many of them feel mind-numbingly repetitive. Later, before lunch, I pulled “New Chapter.” I was told to “not stay stuck in my own resistance,” to “be confident,” and to “leap towards the unknown.”

What kind of people would buy these? I suppose the same people who buy self-help books, but these cards cost a lot more than a book and proffer a lot less advice. The advice seems New-Agey, though, which may appeal to Paltrow’s target audience. And how much profit does Goop make off of what is, in effect, a simple deck of cards? Surely at least 75%!

At any rate, Cillis uses them as a kind of fun game, giving them to her friends to interpret them (even I can’t help reading my horoscope, even though I know it’s bogus!). But there are cheaper ways to have fun, and more adult ways to figure out your life. Cillis concludes:

The cards didn’t ground me, nor did I feel like, even with sustained practice and shuffling each day, they’d enlighten me. But having my friends pull them, as if they actually meant something, was cute and admittedly fun. “By exploring the different themes and patterns, you will discover the world as your playground,” the Inner Compass told me. Or maybe the world is a 6th grade slumber party?

And get ready for the “Goop Lab” (I truly object to this nonsense being characterized as a “lab”), premiering soon on Netflix, and exploring the boundaries of woo. Have a look at the trailer below. Here’s the YouTube sell:

The goop lab with Gwyneth Paltrow is a six-episode series, guiding the deeply inquisitive viewer in an exploration of boundary-pushing wellness topics, including: psychedelics, cold therapy, female pleasure, anti-aging, energy healing and psychics. The goop lab launches on Netflix January 24, 2020.

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Speaking of vaginas, here’s the very latest Goop product, which is already eliciting mockery and revulsion on the Internet. (Click on the screenshot.)

Here’s the description, and if you go to the site you’ll see that, even at $75 a pop, it’s sold out:

People Magazine tells us a bit more:

Per the product description, the item — made by artisanal fragrance brand Heretic — “started as a joke” between perfumer Douglas Little and Paltrow while they were collaborating on a fragrance together. The two were testing scents when the Politician star blurted out, “Uhhh..this smells like a vagina,” the website said.

While the two didn’t end up bottling the “funny, gorgeous, sexy, and beautifully unexpected scent” into a perfume, they did think it would be “perfect as a candle,” the description read.

According to Goop, the brand did a “test run” for the candle during the In Goop Health summit and “it sold out within hours.”

I, for one, have no intention of doing the field work to see if the description is accurate, but it’s amazing that so many people are willing to fork out $75 for an unexpectedly vagina-smelling candle. As P. T. Barnum supposedly said. . .