“HOW GAUCHE.” – Dame Gwyneth

FINALLY. We finally get to hear about the baby gift Gwyneth Paltrow sent to her BFF Beyonce. I’ve been waiting for this! And I’m a little bit disappointed. Considering Blue Ivy Carter already has diamond earrings, a platinum bracelet, a sapphire-encrusted baby bottle and SIX NANNIES, I was expecting Blue’s mother’s best friend to really deliver something so spectacular, it would have put all of the peasantry to shame. Unfortunately, Gwyneth gave a gift that seems almost… normal. It’s really expensive, of course, but it’s also practical.

What kind of stroller did Beyonce get from pal Gwyneth Paltrow? A Bugaboo, naturally!

Paltrow was among the very first to tweet about the birth of her BFF Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy in early January — and the actress, 38, knew just what to gift the chanteuse and her bundle of joy.

Paltrow treated Beyonce and husband Jay-Z to an all-black Cameleon stroller by Bugaboo; the posh baby-transporter retails for $880. (As it happens, Beyonce, 30, scored one of many smash singles with Destiny’s Child in 1999 with the song “Bugaboo,” about a male suitor who just doesn’t know when to give up.)

Before Blue Ivy’s birth, Beyonce (who made her first post-baby appearance Monday and Tuesday in NYC) snapped up a $3500 NurseryWorks VETRO Lucite crib in NYC for her little one, born at 7 lbs Jan. 7 at Lenox Hill Hospital.

Blue’s crib and Bugaboo will fit right in with her extravagant nursery — a 2,200 square-foot space recently built in the superstar family’s Tribeca apartment.

[From Us Weekly]

Maybe Bey and Jay just like stuff in all black – I think all of their cars and SUVs are black too. Anyway, I don’t have a problem with Gwyneth’s gift. I doubt it will ever be used, though. Beyonce and Jay-Z will NEVER push little Blue Ivy down the sidewalk in some peasant-y stroller. Never.

Here’s Goop and Chris Martin (in the same frame!!!!!!) having dinner with one of Gwyneth’s other BFFs/mentees, Taylor Swift, in London a few weeks ago.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.

Gwyneth Paltrow is the cover girl for the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The photo shoot was done by Terry Richardson, and… I don’t really care for it. It’s like Goop is trying to look all shiny and glitzy/sexy, with maybe some hints of rock-star-trashy. And that style simply doesn’t work for Goop. That being said, I think the subscriber’s cover (the one where you don’t see Goop’s face) is intriguing and interesting. Mostly because you don’t see her face. You can see the full Richardson photo shoot here (and the full online interview too). Here are some highlights from Goop’s Bazaar interview:

She doesn’t like Botox: “I’ll take my wrinkles,” she says. “I don’t like the Botox thing.” But she does enjoy sunshine for the vitamin D, despite “my dermatologist yelling at me.” (She admits to “little things, like lasers” and regular facials, often with the London-based Vaishaly Patel.)

She still trains with Tracy Anderson: Today, like every other weekday morning, she has spent an hour and a half with her trainer, Tracy Anderson, doing dance aerobics and a precise series of exercises that changes every 10 days. The aim, she says, is “that you’re muscular, but you don’t get used to anything.”

She’s detoxing too: Right now, the dedicated eater (see Gwyneth chowing on a bocadillo with Mario Batali in Spain or on fried chicken while filming Country Strong down South) is also on a 12-week detox program. “I have a lot of inflammation in my system, so I’m not having anything I’m allergic to—no gluten, no dairy, no sugar.” The trigger for these seasonal detox sessions, she says, is recognizing her physical symptoms: “I’ll wake up exhausted; I can feel my adrenal cortex being really high. When I get into bed, my heart will pound, my skin won’t be good, I’ll feel cranky, and then I’ll just know it’s time.” But such consciousness has an emotional impetus as well: She cites the death in 2002 of her beloved father, director Bruce Paltrow, from throat cancer at 58—after decades of vodka and smoking—as a catalyst for her own conversion to clean living. “All I’ve learned about nutrition and health came from his cancer,” she says. “I’ll probably have a long and healthy life because he didn’t.”

When she’s not detoxing: “I eat whatever I want. I like bread and cheese and wine, and that makes my life fun and enjoyable.” But an outline of her regular diet, along with the rest of her timetable, reveals a model of restraint. She’s up every morning around 7:00 with her two children, Apple and Moses (seven and five, respectively). “I don’t really like eating that early, so I usually just have coffee and then a couple of bites of their leftovers, like granola and yogurt or scrambled eggs.”

What does she do all day? During the day, Gwyneth’s attention turns to her rapidly expanding and soon-to-be-redesigned Web site, goop (which now has more than a million viewers a week and is relaunching next month), and its associated apps, including a new range of city guides, starting with Los Angeles and moving on to London and other world capitals. Then there’s her second cookbook to complete. (The first, My Father’s Daughter, came out last spring; this one, as yet untitled, will focus on “really delicious health food.”)

The Goop Brand: “Everything I’ve done has been completely organic, and that’s why the brand is a strong brand, because there is no ulterior motive behind it,” she says.

Chris Martin is described as “hugely supportive”: The two of them seem affectionately relaxed together—”he’s very communicative,” she says, “which is rare for a British man”—at ease with their nine-year relationship and their roles as parents. “If I’m in L.A. for three days working, then my husband does the school run; it’s always one of us,” although they do have a nanny for the children. “She’s French, so she’s teaching them French, and their previous nanny was Spanish, so they’re fluent in Spanish.” But it’s Gwyneth who gives the children their bath—”we all get into the tub together”—and she’s the one who cooks dinner for them before Apple and Moses go to bed at 8:00. It’s a family dinner, unless she goes out with Chris to eat at her favorite Japanese restaurants in London or for seafood at the members-only Arts Club.

She’s archiving her wardrobe for Apple: “I’ve been saving my clothes for her since before she was born. I was like, I’ll bet you anything I’ll have a daughter, and she’ll be a really cool butch lesbian and be so above clothes, and I got a very clothes-obsessed child. So if she’s a lesbian, she’s a lipstick lesbian. She doesn’t like anything avant-garde at all. She likes anything that’s pretty, pretty, pretty or has a bow or a ruffle or is pink.”

Goop name-drops Beyonce: As it happens, while Beyoncé was headlining the Glastonbury Festival last June (the night after Coldplay), Gwyneth was watching by the side of the stage with Jay-Z and testifies to the fact that her friend’s performance was punctuated by the miserable side effects of early pregnancy: “She was absolutely incredible, especially as she was barfing in between.”

She’s a traditional wife and mother: “I have little kids in school. I want to maintain my marriage and my family, so I have to be here when he comes home.” Hence her recent advice to a girlfriend (who remains tantalizingly unnamed): “She is an actress and in a new relationship with someone else with a big career, and I said this may not be feminist, but you have to compromise. It’s been all about you and you’re a big deal. And if you want what you’re saying you want—a family—you have to be a wife, and that is part of the equation. Gloria Steinem may string me up by my toes, but all I can do is my best, and I can do only what works for me and my family.”

On her exes: Gwyneth remains discreet about her previous boyfriends, who include Brad Pitt (they dated for nearly three years from 1994 and were engaged for six months) and Ben Affleck (in the late ’90s). She met Chris Martin in 2002, three weeks after her father’s death, and married him the following year. But she does confess that she knows what it feels like to be betrayed—”I had a boyfriend who used to cheat on me all the time. I was quite naive. I knew on a cellular level, but I bought his story”—while making it clear that infidelity is not part of her marriage.

But she’s not judging cheaters: She does not condemn others who stray. “The older I get, the more open-minded I get, the less judgmental I get. Life is long. I have friends who I love and admire who have had an affair. When I was younger, I would have said he’s a terrible person or she’s a terrible person. But who made these laws?” And if the commitment to remain within a relationship can be renewed, she believes, then it should survive the inevitable challenges… “I think you do fall in and out of love and you just keep going, and every time you go through a really difficult phase, you rediscover something new and it just gets better. We’ve been married for more than eight years now, and we’re still into it.”

[From Harper’s Bazaar]

I mean… ugh. Nothing she said offended me on a deep level, but there’s some interesting and controversial stuff in here. I find it interesting that Gwyneth is putting herself out there as the anti-feminist, the woman who is holding up traditional values, the one who advises peasant womanfolk to stand by their men and make sure to take care of their families. As for the conversation about infidelity… well… I don’t even know. I think Goop’s marriage is a lot harder than she wants to admit, and she puts up with a lot more than she’ll admit. Which makes me sad for Goop – it feels like she’s “given up” a lot of herself to keep her marriage and family going.

Photos courtesy of Terry Richardson/Bazaar, slideshow here.

Chris Martin has been a touchy, twitchy, nervous bastard for years, especially when it comes to discussing his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, or Gwyneth‘s most famous ex, Brad Pitt. Oddly (and hilariously), Chris never gets twitchy about Gwyneth’s other famous ex, Ben Affleck. Chris might not even know Gwyneth dated Ben Affleck, truly. Anyway, in 2008, Chris spoke about his feelings towards Brad Pitt in a Rolling Stone interview, saying, “You’ve got to be hungry… If your wife went out with Brad Pitt, you’d want to prove yourself, you know what I mean?” Later that year, Chris punched an interviewer (and called the dude a C-U-Next-Tuesday) for mentioning Gwyneth’s engagement to Brad. As of the past few years, Chris has managed to avoid conversations about Brad, although he still gets super-twitchy when asked about Gwyneth and his marriage in general.

Which makes this story in the Enquirer oddly believable. I’m not saying it’s the gospel or anything, just that I could see something like this happening and I could see Chris reacting this way:

If you’re succumbing to the sneaky suspicion that Gwyneth Paltrow’s beautiful but dumb, ponder this: rocker hubby Chris Martin’s eyes popped when he spotted an obviously pricey diamond bracelet on Gwyneth’s wrist – and when he quizzed her, thick-as-a-brick-but-gorgeous Gwyn did what just about no other woman on earth would have done – admitted that long-ago lover Brad Pitt gifted her with the beautiful bauble during their engagement 15 years ago.

Instantly, Chris jealously blew his stack as goofy Gwyneth abruptly emerged from her coma, promising to sell Pitt’s piece and donate the dough to charity!

[From The Enquirer, print edition]

Do you think Gwyneth still has (and wears) gifts from her former lovers? I bet she still has a lot of that stuff (the really nice stuff, not the cheap peasant crap), and I could see her wearing it too. But here’s a question: Chris and Gwyneth have been together for what? Nearly a decade? And Chris is just now noticing a piece of jewelry Gwyneth has had all of this time? That sounds reasonable too – he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who notices stuff like that. And maybe Gwyneth just wore the bracelet to piss off Chris. Because that’s the way she rolls.

Photos courtesy of WENN.

Just yesterday, I made a half-hearted attempt at joking about Gwyneth Paltrow’s obsession with colon cleansing. Yet I should’ve known that, to Goop, this is not merely a laughing matter, for a pristine colon is serious business. She is obsessed with her poop. In other words, the New Year’s edition of the Goop newsletter has kept with its annual tradition (this is the third year running, y’all) of insisting that her minions clean out their poopers. This time, she’s not merely suggesting a cleansing regimen for all of us to follow, but now she has branded the chosen cleanse with her Goop emblem:

The goop Cleanse

Next week, when it’s back to the grind with work and the daily school run, I’m starting off with Clean, my go-to cleanse from Dr. Alejandro Junger, with whom goop has partnered for the month of January. I’ve used Clean in the past with great results, losing a few pounds and kickstarting a healthier and more energetic New Year. This month, I’ll be doing it along with members of the goop team and we hope you will too. And, it goes without saying, but be sure to check with your doctor before getting started!

Love,
gp

Actually, this special deal isn’t really a “special” Goop cleanse after all. If you compare Goop’s version with the one usually offered on Dr. Junger’s site, it’s the same exact thing except for the Goop box on the outside. So for the same price — $425 — you get a three-week supply of herbs and the option of choosing either chocolate or vanilla-flavored protein shakes. Geez, for that price, shouldn’t there be at least a Crispy Carrot Ginger flavor? And maybe a Luxardo Maraschino variety for Goop subscribers?

The cleanse itself differs somewhat from the Master Cleanse that Goop has advocated in the past and for which Vanity Fair hired a poor freelance writer to follow and journal in gory detail. With this cleansing program, eating lunch (from a special list of Goop-approved foods) is actually allowed. Other than that, there’s a “Clean” shake for breakfast and dinner and a bunch of “powerful plant-based Clean supplements” for the in-between times. Basically, it’s a ripoff that promises “to kick start your metabolism” and give you a colon that’s just perfect and just like Gwyneth’s very own. Uh … pass?

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame, and Goop

Demi Moore covers the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar with a covershoot that is obviously photoshopped to the max. No news there, but the accompanying interview is slightly more interesting, since Demi is promoting her new producing gig with “The Conversation,” a show that will premiere on Lifetime. The interview is really more of a conversation between Demi and her producing partner, Amanda de Cadenet, who reveal that their show will “featur[e] strikingly frank discussions with A-listers,” i.e. prominent women that will discuss “the universal themes in women’s lives” such relationships, body image, sex, career. It’s a great concept, but the guests are guaranteed to be sanctimonious as hell.

Sure enough, Demi and Amanda have revealed that Gwyneth Paltrow — in all her infinite wisdom — has been interviewed for the show. Of course, there are other “strong” women like Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, and Jane Fonda who will appear as well, but Demi and Amanda have singled out Goop as being able to spout the best “listen to your inner guide” sort of mantra. Spare me. With Goop, the inner guide pretty much says, “Marry a super rich guy, exercise two hours per day, and cleanse the colon regularly.” Oh, and “Discuss one’s exquisite friendships with the Dalai Lama and Beyonce at every given opportunity.” Inner guide, my ass.

Anyway, Demi herself comes across pretty well (despite the title of this post) during this particular conversation, which was conducted “post-Thanksgiving” and, therefore, in the wake of Demi filing for divorce from her douche husband. Mercifully, Ashton is mentioned nowhere during this discussion. Instead, this interview is something of a graceful dance between two girlfriends, which is kind of where I like to think of Demi these days; that is, not doing a sexy dance for men or pretending to be Gloria Steinem. Instead, she’s merely hanging with a girlfriend, and they’re supporting each other. Here are a few excerpts:

On Body Image: “I have had a love-hate relationship with my body. When I’m at the greatest odds with my body, it’s usually because I feel my body’s betraying me, whether that’s been in the past, struggling with my weight and feeling that I couldn’t eat what I wanted to eat, or that I couldn’t get my body to do what I wanted it to do. I think I sit today in a place of greater acceptance of my body, and that includes not just my weight but all of the things that come with your changing body as you age to now experiencing my body as extremely thin – thin in a way that I never imagined somebody would be saying to me, ‘You’re too thin, and you don’t look good.’”

On Abandonment & The Unknown: “I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, ‘Only children can be abandoned. Adults can’t be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don’t have a choice.’ So I started to rethink. ‘Okay, it’s not that. What’s the underlying thread that really scares me?’ I think what scares me is not having the courage to reach my full potential . . . which means that I would allow fear, insecurity, and doubt to rule me and that I would ask for only a little of what is actually there for me. It would mean that I would be settling.

“And so for me, it’s not just about reaching my potential in terms of my career. It goes more to the idea of being whole, of loving oneself. And I think there is no way to reach your fullest potential if you don’t really find the love of yourself. If I were to answer it just kind of bold-faced, I would say what scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.

“And that I wasn’t wanted here in the first place, so the fight against gravity for me is to find that love for myself that gives me the courage to reach my fullest potential, to actually receive this abundance that’s really there. I also think that what scares you goes back to being a kid; what really scares you is not knowing. What scares me the most is not knowing and accepting that just about everything is not in my control. That makes me feel unsafe.”

On Comfort: “I think being comfortable is perhaps overrated. I think a better word than comfortable is accepting. Accepting weaknesses and strengths and being more able to celebrate all of it as a whole package. Well, it indicates an illusion as opposed to the reality, which is that we don’t live in black and white – we live in the gray – and that, as you’re saying, stepping out of the familiar, the known, the comfortable, allows us to become more whole and complete. So to answer the question ‘Have I become more comfortable with myself as a woman?’ I would say that I have in the sense of valuing myself, certainly more than I did when I was a teenager.”

On Her Idea Of Freedom: “Letting go of the outcome. Truly being in the moment. Not reflecting on the past. Not projecting into the future. That’s freedom. Not caring more about what other people think than what you think. That’s freedom. To not be defined by your wounds. Somebody wrote something to me that said, ‘Don’t let your wounds make you become someone you’re not.’ That’s really powerful.”

[From Harper's Bazaar]

I’m relieved that Demi seems to acknowledge that she’s grown far too thin during the past year or so because she really looks incredibly frail these days. Her other statements ring very true as well, and I understand that baring her soul during the course of this conversation was both (1) Very planned; (2) In the interest of promoting her Lifetime show. Yet Demi still comes off remarkably lucid, particularly in light of her recent painful split.

Oddly enough, Demi also confesses to her guilty pleasure, which is watching “Jersey Shore.” I do hope she’s not scoping out DJ Pauly D as her next sexual conquest. Don’t go there, Demi! Sadly though, all of the guys on that show combined are less revolting than her soon-to-be ex-husband. And that’s saying something.

Photos courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar

When a game that provides days of mindless addictive entertainment costs .99, Gwyneth Paltrow is really reaching by charging a relatively steep $3.99 for her new Goop City Guides, which so far features only New York. The app promises that LA and London are coming, and little “coming soon” bubbles take the place of blinking “under construction” gifs. I downloaded it and it’s on par with what she normally offers, but it feels thin and obviously pretentious. When there are better, cheaper (and free) apps that do the same thing, (sans the sanctimony) it’s just too expensive without offering much. Plus I kept wondering how much she was paid to plug the various shops and restaurants she was mentioning.

There are two videos in the app. One is a sweeping tour of New York featuring Gwyneth showing us her favorite spots. I wish I could find a version of it online, and it will leak somewhere soon enough. She keeps mentioning “tourists” with derision while showing us both out of the way little places and high end spots. She really doesn’t care that she’s an elitist, she’s either oblivious to it or just can’t be bothered to worry about it. She’s obviously never going to be apologetic about it. The other video is a one and a half minute interview with Gwyneth’s New York city driver. He recommends different places to eat around town that are affordable. There are recommendations for bars, restaurants and shops but it feels familiar, haughty and not at all innovative or interesting. It’s Goop, on your mobile device. I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything else.

Gawker has a good review of the app, so I’ll include theirs:

I played around with the $3.99 Goop app today. It’s a city guide cast in tones as smooth as Gwyneth’s skin, with blurbs written in a prose style so precious it almost seems like Gwyneth herself is whispering recommendations softly into your ear, gently guiding you to human bliss; a bright, brilliant room in a bright, big house on the Maine coast, her hair shining gold in the light glinting off distant waves…

Sorry! Got distracted for a second.

There’s a little video that shows Gwenyth Paltrow visiting all her favorite places in New York, and spending approximately $20,000 in a matter of hours. There’s also a video featuring the favorite places of her personal driver, Rudy, to show how Gwenyth can also relate to poor people.

A handy map shows all nearby Goop-recommended locations as you traipse around the city buoyed by your 7 am kelp smoothie, in case you need an emergency gluten-free baked good for your kid, whom you have inexplicably named after an everyday object, like Table. Using location-based apps like this in New York can be dangerous, as they distract you from walking. But if you fall off a curb while looking at your Goop app, we imagine a rich handsome man will come to your rescue, ask you to dinner at Goop-approved Balthazar, and you’ll end up getting married and going on a honeymoon where you swim naked with dolphins.

My personal favorite feature of the Goop app is the “Favourites” feature. (So British!) This allows you to easily save your favourite (sic) things from the Goop app, like The Breathing Project yoga studio, so you can have your manservant carry you over there on a litter made of swan feathers at your own leisure.

Bottom-line: The Goop app is the best city guide for anyone with infinite time and money.

[From Gawker]

Here’s what bothers me the most, though, the reviews on iTunes are all glowingly positive. Unlike Amazon reviews, on iTunes there’s no way to sort out legitimate reviewers from friends of the developer that are giving one-off positive reviews. (That I know of. There are names but it’s not simple to find all reviews by a single reviewer.) So the 15 all five star ratings praising Goop and saying how great the app is are very suspect given the material. They say things like “Gwyneth never ceases to impress and amaze and this app is just another one of her ingenious ideas… I also love that Gwyneth is never apologetic and always conscious of her audience.” Her audience? Monied friends who eat up her pearls of wisdom. The rest of us find her recommendations entirely one-sided and behind the times. When there are better NY apps that provide aggregate reviews and more features for free, why bother with Goop? Is she ever going to update with London and LA? Is this just a way to feel her ego and provide a nice tax deduction? It’s actually pretty smart in that way. Whenever she goes anywhere the bitch can write it off her taxes.

Gwyneth Paltrow can single-handedly heal America’s racial divide! Not really, and I don’t mean to make it sound like Gwyneth is claiming that either. Gwyneth appeared on the HuffPo Black Voices show The Tanning Effect to discuss race in America with host Steve Stoute, author of The Tanning of America, a book that explores how “hip-hop culture” changed the way Americans view race and the economy. So of course, he wanted to speak to Dame Gwyneth, who is America’s Foremost Racial Expert. She’s friends with Beyonce and Jay-Z, after all!

Long before captivating moviegoers across the globe with her award-winning acting skills, Gwyneth Paltrow was front and center of a pivotal cultural shift. While growing up in Santa Monica, California, her father, Bruce Paltrow, created and wrote for the late ’70s CBS drama “The White Shadow,” which examined racial stereotypes in America and exposed the actress to many seminal television “Tanning” moments. As she explains in HuffPost Black Voices latest episode of “The Tanning Effect,” Paltrow witnessed her father’s impact at the time on American society.

“I think the most ‘Tanning’ that I saw during that phase of my life was my dad, [who] created, wrote and directed a TV show called ‘The White Shadow,’ about a white basketball coach teaching basketball in an inner-city school,” she explained. “And that show that he did — I mean, obviously we were there a lot, but it was interesting to see that culturally start to permeate. And he did a lot of ‘firsts’ on that show. He had the first interracial kiss ever. It was a good show.”

“I learned a lot of it through the show, especially since they were using a lot of the stereotypes as a way to exploit them or expose them or to debunk them,” she continued. “And a lot of times obviously in a creative situation, those stereotypes are what causes tension and story lines and plots.”

Having an unbiased viewpoint on multicultural relationships is also a trait that the “Shakespeare in Love” star has shared with her two children. In fact, the 39-year-old admitted that the shift of beauty in America is “long overdue.”

“I don’t want to bemoan the fact that it should’ve happened 50 years ago, because it’s here now,” she added. “And it’s like the way I see it is that I have two little kids who are understanding the world in a time when Rihanna is on the cover of Vogue, and we have a black president. So their eyes are being as if they’re experiencing the world for the first time. All of this stuff is just root — it’s normal stuff for them. And that to me is what’s so incredible.”

“When my daughter understood what a president was, it was a black man. It’s not like me, where I grew up with all of these old white guys one after another … Their perspective on race and everything is completely open and completely different to how it was when I was a kid.”

[From Huffington Post]

I don’t really have a problem with what Gwyneth is saying – she’s just talking about her dad, who really was a ground-breaking television producer, and I don’t have a problem with her comments about Obama and the shifting standards of beauty. She’s right – it is important that all kids see that we have a black president, that African-American women are iconic, celebrated beauties, and that mommy’s BFF is Beyonce.

Photos courtesy of WENN.

You know what’s bad? Gwyneth Paltrow puts so much time, energy, money and ego into getting dressed for various red carpets, and it’s gotten to the point where she almost always looks WORSE when she’s trying, as opposed to her casual look. Look at these photos of Goop last night in London, where she met up with Guy Ritchie for dinner (more on that in a moment). Her hair isn’t flat-ironed to within an inch of its life, her makeup is soft and barely-there. Her outfit isn’t stunning, but I don’t hate it either, and she looks cute and young and her skin looks great. Why can’t she find a way to translate her under-done “street style” to the red carpet? She’s like the polar opposite of Jennifer Garner, who always looks busted in her “street style” but usually looks fresh and beautiful on the red carpet. WTF?

By the way, this white sweater of Goop’s? It’s a repeat! She was wearing it in NYC a month ago, and many of you were lusting after it then, when she paired it with skinny jeans. Dame Gwyneth is deigning to show us the versatility of this sweater – it can be paired with skinny jeans OR a jaunty little skirt. I’m sure the sweater costs upwards of $2000. So versatile! Dame Goop just wanted us to see it again. As for the outfit as a whole – CB hates the skirt, but my least favorite parts are the tights and the booties.

Now, for the Guy Ritchie gossip… I’ve got nothing, really. We already know that Gwyneth and Madonna are no longer friends, but of course Gwyneth would stay friends with such an influential director like Guy. OF COURSE. Guy was at the dinner with his baby-mama Jacqui Ainsley, who just gave birth two months ago. Do you think Guy and Goop ever talk about how much they hate Madonna now?

Photos courtesy of WENN.

Damn, Gwyneth Paltrow looks like hell here, doesn’t she? These are photos of Goop from last night’s Bambi Awards in Germany. Goop wore this Elie Saab dress which… doesn’t suit her. Go here to see the runway look – it’s actually beautiful on the runway. On Goop, though, it falls flat. Operative word: flat. What’s going on in the chest area? Couldn’t Goop get some tailoring so she wouldn’t look so… low? Beyond the dress and how the shade of green looks kind of cheap on her, her face looks busted too. And her FLAT IRONED HAIR. Dear God, it’s like we’re still back in the 1990s. Why must Goop do this to all of the time? Someone (Chris Martin) needs to take away her flat iron and burn that mofo.

In case you’re wondering about Goop’s necklace - it’s Annoushka. Fug.

Goop also presented an award to Justin Bieber, it seems. Do you think little Apple is a Bieliber? Anyway, she got to stand there with Justin and some chick!!!!! OMG. That should totally go in the next Goop newsletter.

Speaking of this week’s Goop-letter, Gwyneth talks about holiday gift-giving and some of her suggestions are… dare I say it… interesting. You can read the full Goop here – she makes lots of jewelry gift suggestions, and she seems to be putting in an effort to suggest some reasonably priced pieces. I LOVE the fingerprint earrings. I also love the pale-pink hardback Jane Austen collection. Gah! This week’s Goop is good, and a lot of the companies are offering discounts if you say you heard of them from Goop. Smart and well-thought out. I hate when that happens!

Photos courtesy of WENN.

So Kaiser had the title saved for this story and I started sending her emails complaining about how I was offended by Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter this week. Goop gave us a makeup “tutorial” that was basic stuff I learned when I first started applying makeup as a teen. There was honestly nothing useful at all in there for me. I have auburn hair and pale reddish skin and I do my makeup every day. I can’t remember the last time I went out without makeup, and I don’t feel like myself when I don’t wear it. I don’t wear a lot, and unlike Gwen Stefani I have no problem sitting at home with a bare face around my loved ones, but when I go out I wear it. I know makeup, I know how to apply it, and I know what looks good with my coloring. You can call me insecure or vain or whatever, but I like doing my hair and makeup every day.

Anyway, Goop used a “dear friend” as a model and wrote that she asked a London makeup artist to do her over and give us advice. It was so basic it annoyed me. I’ll just include Goop’s message here. You can go to Goop’s site for the very simple tutorial:

Believe it or not, I am terrible at doing my own makeup. I’m decent at doing it for a friend, but when it comes to my own face, I never get it right. I have been wanting a step by step lesson for ages so I asked my London makeup artist, Emma Lovell, to show me how. One of my gorgeous school mum friends from my son Mosey’s class agreed to be the model (thank you, Kate!), and I learned so much. I hope it’s helpful for some of you!

[From Goop]

I guess if you have no clue how to apply makeup or what products are available the very basic advice may be useful to you. There was nothing new there or informative to me whatsoever. Doesn’t every makeup tutorial tell you that you need to curl your eyelashes first?

This kind of illustrates for me why Goopy goes out without makeup and why she often looks like hell at events. I’ve seen her do that thing where she rims the membranes and lids of her eyes with thin black eyeliner, making her look squinty.

It bothers me that this woman assumes everyone else is as inept with makeup as she is. When I go looking for tutorials, I want to learn how to do a smokey eye, the right brushes to use to apply and blend blush with my face shape, and how to shape my eyebrows and fill them, not just that I should use an eyebrow pencil and a “cream blush on the apple of the cheek.” Really, Gwyneth? You’ve been working red carpets for years and this makeup advice is news to you? It’s like she really does think we need her guidance in all matters.

Update: I’ve been thinking about this, and the thing that bothers me the most is that Gwyneth assumes everyone is at the exact same level that she is, in everything. She shares gourmet recipes regularly. This makeup advice is the equivalent of telling us how to boil an egg or bake a potato. There are people who need to know how to do that, but that’s not what she claims to be about.

These photos are from 2008 and 2009, when Gwyneth’s makeup was particularly bad. She seems to have hired a makeup artist afterwards.