Gwyneth Paltrow stands by one of her most controversial Goop product creations — the ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candle.
Quizzed over the product, which was unveiled via her lifestyle website in 2020, during an appearance at the 2025 Mindvalley Manifesting Summit in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 17, Paltrow addressed the negative attention it attracted.
“You know, that product is so fascinating,” the actress, 52, said, as captured in an Instagram video posted by the summit’s official account on Sunday, May 18. “It took us a long time to live that one down, but I kept it on the site because there is an aspect to women’s sexuality that I think … we’re socialized to feel a lot of shame. And I sort of loved this kind of punk rock idea.”
Paltrow concluded, “We are beautiful and we are awesome and go f*** yourself.”
The product, which sparked its own 2022 spinoff candle titled “Hands Off My Vagina,” nodding to reproductive freedom, was originally launched in a quest to empower the website’s female fanbase.
Paltrow told Us Weekly in September 2020, “You grew up getting messaging around the feminine care that was heavily scented with synthetic fragrance and all this kind of thing. I just felt like it was time to make a bit of a feminist statement around accepting who we are and our femininity.”
She added at the time, “I feel like once people get past the initial shock of it and you really start to unpack what it means and what it’s saying, it’s pretty cool.”
Paltrow’s weekend discussion also revisited how the product originated, with the Shakespeare in Love actress telling guests, “We were messing around with different scents one day and I smelled something and I was like, ‘Oh, that smells like…’, you know,” she explained.
“I was joking. And then [Douglas Little, Heretic perfumer and Goop collaborator] was like, ‘Oh, we should make that a candle and put it on the site,’” Paltrow continued.
Paltrow has never shied away from buckling societal confines, recently revealing that her two children, daughter Apple, 21, and son, Moses, 19, appreciate the way they’ve been raised. (Paltrow shares both children with ex-husband Chris Martin and she married Brad Falchuk in 2018.)
“They are very proud of the iconoclastic approach that we have taken in the past,” Paltrow told E! News in an article published on Monday, May 12. “Looking back, there are always things that we used to write about [at Goop] where people were like, ‘Oh my gosh, what is this?’ And now they’re so mainstream. My kids are really proud of the fact that we’re always kind of first in this space.”
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