Good grief – doesn’t Gwyneth Paltrow have any friends capable of convincing her that she doesn’t know enough to be giving out medical advice? That there really are compelling reasons for not telling the world what to put in or on or up its poor vulnerable body unless one has the relevant knowledge? Which she doesn’t?

Dean Burnett at the Guardian tells us about her dangerous hobby.

For someone of even the slightest scientific inclination, Goop is a veritable cornucopia of What-The-Fuck? There’s “spirit truffles”, which contain “spirit dust” which apparently “feeds harmony and extrasensory perception through pineal gland de-calcification and activation”. In fairness to Goop, those are definitely all real words. They’ve got us there.

There’s the “morning smoothie” which lists as an ingredient Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus which genuinely turns insects into zombies by infecting their brains. Gwyneth Paltrow is literally telling her fans to consume brain-controlling fungus!

Because zombie-brain erases wrinkles?

At least things have an actual physical presence. The less said about the products that work by being infused with positive vibes and good intentions, the better. Same goes for vaginal steaming.

Vaginal steaming was the item I thought of before reading on. It stays in the mind, rather.

And never let it be said that Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t personally willing to suffer for her beliefs, as she’s recently revealed her latest interest is apitherapy, specifically the practice of deliberately getting bees to sting her, to supposedly get rid of inflammation and scarring.

There’s a lot to question about this claim. Firstly, using bee stings to get rid of inflammation is like using petrol bombs to get rid of a house fire. Bee stings, like most insect venom, cause inflammation! If you’ve ever been stung by anything, you know this, as the sting site swells up like a small-but-angry red balloon.

Well…like cures like, or something. Or maybe if it hurts it must be doing you good. Or bees give us honey so the stings must be beneficial, like honey. Or no pain no gain. It’s one of those, or something else.

But it would be churlish to hold Gwyneth Paltrow solely responsible for this, as the issue is much bigger than her. The beauty industry regularly and openly misuses science when it comes to hawking their products to an unsuspecting population. Beauty products like to include just enough science-sounding words and phrases to seem credible (pentapeptides, anyone?) without actually having to do anything as hard as conforming to the rigorous rules of actual science.

In a society where women are constantly harassed to look their best but paradoxically criticised for attempting to do so, it’s hardly surprising that any claim from a powerful industry to be able to enhance or fix appearance with minimum effort is going to be seized upon by anyone unfortunate enough to be vulnerable to the laws of nature (i.e. everyone, except possibly Gwyneth Paltrow).

Paltrow’s latest claim is just another symptom of this, albeit an especially bizarre and surreal one. This again is hardly surprising, given how many high-profile figures end up developing their own egocentric model of how reality works, and such is the way the human mind works when it comes to successful, confident figures that they’ll always have their believers and supporters.

Those egocentric models of how the world works are going to ruin everything, I swear.