I Just Watched 'Goop Lab' and I am Not Okay

Lately, it feels like every show has us thinking, “What the f*ck did I just watch?” In this series, we will break down exactly what happened in all those wild, mind-bendy, and just plain strange shows…in a way that’s much easier to understand than the actual episodes.

This post contains spoilers for the goop lab with Gwyneth Paltrow

It is incredibly apparent when you switch on the goop lab with Gwyneth Paltrow that this is some hippie shit. Which shouldn’t be surprising, since the goop brand is infamously synonymous with crystals and cleanses — and the un-ironic vulva design of the goop lab poster should have warned me about exactly what kind of nonsense I was getting into. There’s even a literal warning at the beginning of each episode telling you to consult a doctor before trying any of the treatments on this show. But nothing can prepare you for how weird the goop lab is.

The docu-series comes in HOT with an episode about psychedelics, followed by an episode about cold therapy, a.k.a. doing yoga in the snow and jumping into freezing water for your health. Both of these are supposed to help with anxiety but made me incredibly anxious to watch. I was too scared to see Midsommar but this is what I imagine it was like.

The people of the interwebs have already started making fun of how “Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t know what a vagina” is in the episode with sex educator Betty Dodson — but I’m willing to giving her a pass. It basically proves the point that stigma and incompetent sex education in schools has left women to figure out so much on our own… even when you sell vagina-scented candles and jade eggs.

My favorite episode, surprisingly, is the one in which Gwyneth and two of her staffers do various cleanses to take years off of their “inner age,” whatever that means. I’m very skeptical of wellness trends that essentially boil down to starving yourself — but hangry Paltrow, who admits that her initials could stand for “guinea pig,” is the realest I’ve ever seen her. She’s definitely self-aware, y’all, even if she can’t always remember which Marvel movies she’s been in.

Then there’s an episode where a guy heals their “energy fields” and it looks like they were being massaged without being touched. I don’t even know what to do with this one. Then, in the last episode, a medium compares people who are skeptical of what she does to people who believe the Earth is flat. Sure, Jan. I think this show is supposed to make all of this goop stuff more accessible, but I feel further from it all than ever.

Every now and then, someone will use science-y words like “placebo effect,” “control subjects,” “subatomic particles,” and “bio-statistics” and put my mind at ease that maybe these people know what they’re talking about… but then I remember the warning at the beginning of each episode and that words are just words.

I’m left with so many questions after watching this series, including:

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