Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina candle started out as a joke.
The 52-year-old actress' brand Goop launched their 'This Smells Like My Vagina' candle in 2020 and "broke the internet" as a result, but she admitted it wasn't a serious idea that she had when working with Heretic perfumer Douglas Little.
In a video shared on social media from her appearance at the 2025 Mindvalley Manifesting Summit in Los Angeles over the weekend, she said: “We were messing around with different scents one day and I smelled something and I was like, ‘Oh, that smells like…’, you know,”
“I was joking. And then [Douglas] was like, ‘Oh we should make that a candle and put it on the site,'” the Oscar winner explained, adding sarcastically that the idea “sounded like a winner.
“All of a sudden, it was literally on the website. And then we broke the Internet again. And then it took us a long time to live that one down.”
But the 'Iron Man' actress loves the "punk rock" message of the candle, which she thinks hepled tackle the "shame" women can feel about their sexuality.
She added: “You know, that product is so fascinating.
“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 socialised to feel a lot of shame.
"And I sort of loved this kind of punk rock idea. 'We are beautiful and we are awesome and go f*** yourself.'”
The candle has now been discontinued, but was followed by 'This Smells Like My Orgasm', 'This Smells Like My Prenup' and 'Hands Off My Vagina'.
And Gwyneth - who has Apple, 21, and Moses, 19, with ex-husband Chris Martin and is married to Brad Falchuk - previously explained the range was designed as a "feminist statement".
She told Us Weekly magazine 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.
“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.”
