I’m conscious that the Goop holiday gift guide – and particularly the notorious “Ridiculous but Awesome” section – has become so knowing, so tongue-in-cheek, that to parse it is to play into Gwyneth Paltrow’s gold-painted hands. The whole thing is plainly workshopped to death at Goop’s oatmeal leather and blond wood Santa Monica headquarters to create the precision-tooled blend of outrage and aspiration that gets GP column inches. Despite that, moth to the open flame of a Dome Outdoor Oven ($2,149), I cannot resist.
Capitulating to the Goop master plan has consolations. There are some vintage picks: the $28,500 perv ottoman (sorry, “tufted boudoir chaise” with stirrups and restraints) and the €15,900 preppers’ bunker (for those “who lead modern, self-providing lives”) catch my eye, inevitably. So does the fetishy $239 beribboned baguette bag for carrying your Tesco French stick (or, indeed, the $210 lamp made from a real baguette from the 2020 gift guide). Then $3,900 of seemingly Goop-inspired minibar snacks (pistachio milk, seeded honey and sea moss), to “accompany” the $299 joint rolling machine is pleasingly on-brand.
However, I detect a hint of “will this do?” malaise infecting this year’s guide. A Gucci dog collar and a Gucci dog lead, separately? This would not pass muster in any gift guide I was compiling. Why are there three men’s Rolexes? Worse still, I counted seven Chanel handbags on there, two of which I can barely tell apart. Even the much-discussed $75 bag of manure from free-range farm animals smacks of a lack of ambition when you can buy cat repellant made from lion poo on Amazon. Doesn’t Richard Branson have an island full of endangered species? They would have made a far more exclusive sack of shit.
It leaves me wondering: are they OK over there? It’s almost as if GP has realised the guide is a bit unseemly in the current permacrisis and left it to a gang of confused, possibly malnourished underlings. Get a grip, Goopies: we need your absurdity. I recommend a course of Moon Juice Brain Dust ($55) before next year.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
