Gwyneth Paltrow has revealed that the magazine deal with Conde Nast to produce her Goop quarterly ended after only two issues, because the publishing powerhouse objected to some of her unorthodox remedies and she wanted more control.
Paltrow, 45, launched the magazine to accompany her wellness and retail site in the autumn of 2017, with a front cover featuring her covered in mud.
Yet only two issues of the $15 publication were released.
“They’re a company that’s really in transition and do things in a very old-school way,” Paltrow told the New York Times.
“We realised we could just do a better job of it ourselves in-house. I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Conde, understandably, there are a lot of rules.”
Conde Nast reportedly objected to Goop magazine’s promotion of Goop products, insisting that they publish magazines, not catalogues.
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Paltrow’s team, in turn, objected to Conde Nast’s fact checking.
The Oscar-winning actress has long claimed that she is not encouraging “quackery”, but rather engaging in a discussion about alternatives to mainstream treatments and therapies.
“We’re never making statements,” she said.
The website, which began as a newsletter produced by Paltrow for her friends, and has grown into a $250 million business, has faced a barrage of complaints over its content.
Its articles on jade eggs, inserted into the vagina, have been ridiculed, as have features on bee sting therapy, a salt shampoo that would detoxify your scalp, and a water bottle with rose quartz in it, intended to infuse water with "positive energy".
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In 2016, a division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus began an inquiry into Goop for deceptive marketing claims about the life-optimizing powers of Moon Juice products, which appeared on the Goop site as a key ingredient in a smoothie.
The watchdog organization TruthInAdvertising.org (TINA) sent Paltrow a letter that referred to numerous instances of deceptive marketing claims.
Goop replied and adjusted some of its claims in the short period the letter allotted, but TINA found its response inadequate and reported Goop to the district attorney’s offices in both Santa Cruz and Santa Clara.
And in June 2017 Nasa complained after her site promoted “wellness stickers” which claimed to use Nasa technology.
Paltrow said that Goop has now changed its policies – hiring a lawyer to vet all claims on the site, and an editor from Conde Nast to run the magazine.
In September the magazine will have a full-time fact checker, she said.
Paltrow said the hires were a “necessary growing pain.”
“I really liked acting,” she told the paper.
“But at a certain point, it started to feel frustrating in a way not to have true agency, like to be beholden to other people to give you a job, or to create something, to put something into the world.”