“Post the last pic on your camera roll – no cheating!” is a popular Instagram game you may or may not have encountered on social media. The idea is to post a photo that isn’t over-thought or over-styled but, instead, is indicative of the “real you”. I couldn’t help but think of this when I viewed Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest Instagram post. Sitting barefoot and braless on a sofa in a beige slip dress and a matching robe, the 52-year-old actress-turned-entrepreneur seemed to be doing her damndest to look nonchalant, and like “the real her”.

The caption could have been “I woke up like this”, but instead, it was: “The most perfect cashmere set from @falconeriofficial for cozy fall.” Paltrow wasn’t being nonchalant at all: she was in selling mode. Hard-selling mode, in fact, given the semi-transparency of her slip dress, which was surely worn in the knowledge it would create a talking point online. If anyone knows how to get our attention, it’s Gwyneth. Why else would she have launched a candle called “This Smells Like My Vagina”?

Launched in 2020, the Goop candle was surely the most talked-about piece of wax ever burnt. It was even more talked about than Goop’s vaginal jade eggs, or its sex oil. A wellness brand that started rather humbly as a newsletter in 2008, everybody wanted a piece of Goop, because everybody wanted to be a bit more Gwyneth – a polarising creature, for sure, on account of her fondness for wacky wellness regimes (she once boasted on a podcast about how she’d “used ozone therapy rectally”), but a highly aspirational one.

Paltrow’s beauty – too rare to be “girl next door”, but still natural enough to feel vaguely attainable – rapidly made Goop a major player in the cut-throat world of global wellness, a market recently valued by McKinsey as being worth more than £1 trillion ($2 trillion), with annual growth of up to 10 per cent. While there is no shortage of celebrity beauty, fashion and wellness brands in the firmament, there is something highly specific about Paltrow’s allure that her rivals struggle to emulate. It’s no accident that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s much-vaunted rival still hasn’t launched: Paltrow is a shrewd businesswoman and a formidable opponent.

She’s one of the few Hollywood stars whose lives pique genuine fascination; a contradiction of a woman who steams her vagina, “consciously uncouples” with her husband (Coldplay singer Chris Martin) then pulls off the trick of being besties with his subsequent (now former) girlfriend, Dakota Johnson. She’s a clean eater, but she also confesses to the occasional cigarette (“It’s what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2013).

Loading

But if Paltrow is a genius at packaging and selling her celebrity lifestyle to the masses, there are signs that some of these pursuits aren’t quite as effortless as she’d like us to think. Last year, Goop’s London store was shuttered after losing an estimated £1.4 million. Last month, trade journal WWD reported that Goop planned to cut 18 per cent of its workforce as part of a restructuring effort. Her clothing line, G Label, while up 51 per cent in revenue, doesn’t seem to have captured women’s imagination like The Row, despite sharing the same tasteful, neutral “quiet luxury” aesthetic that has made Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s label so popular and successful. Paltrow determinedly wore her brand throughout her high-profile 2023 trial that saw her take the stand for eight days defending herself against a £230,000 lawsuit after a ski crash in Utah.

Paltrow’s high-end cosmetics line, Goop Beauty, also appears to be underperforming, certainly given the appeal of its founder – one of few 50-something women in Hollywood whose face still looks natural, something which aligns well with her “clean beauty” ethos. Revenue has slowed, up 20 per cent so far this year compared to a favourable 42 per cent for the end of 2023. Beauty insiders feel that Paltrow missed a trick by overly focusing on sensationalist products rather than pushing those with more longevity. A more affordably priced range, good.clean.goop, launched at Target last October, but sales weren’t what they could have been. Which is unfortunate, given that she recently told Vanity Fair: “I’m a total psycho when it comes to product development. I will not stop until we’ve created something that’s incredible.”

She may not stop, but she’s certainly willing to go on hiatus. In August, she surprised the movie industry by announcing she’d taken a role in Marty Supreme, a film inspired by the pro ping pong player Marty Reisman. If the plot sounds Challengers-adjacent, it’s not the only parallel to be found with that film’s star, Zendaya, the 28-year-old actress riding high as the hottest property in fashion as well as film. Paltrow will be acting opposite Timothée Chalamet, who also starred alongside Zendaya in the sci-fi epic Dune.