Gwyneth Paltrow's ‘vagina candle' is still burning bright – at five times the original price
How do I know this? Not, to be clear, because I am spending my evenings searching for vagina-scented candles. No, I know this because the chatter around Paltrow's candle is impossible to fully extinguish; it keeps popping back up in the news. In 2021, for example, there was a big hoo-hah because a Texas man claimed that the candle exploded on his bedside table. No one was injured but a lawsuit was filed for the Texas man and others who 'through no fault of their own, bought defective and dangerous vagina-scented candles'.
That case was later dropped. The candles are now back in the headlines because Paltrow was speaking at an event called the Mindvalley Manifesting Summit over the weekend and revealed that her famous creation originally started off as a joke. The perfume team were apparently messing around with scents when she said, 'Oh, that smells like … you know.' And, well, you know what happens next. Paltrow also revealed that she thinks her candle was very 'punk rock' and challenged the shame around female sexuality. And if you don't agree, she thinks you should 'go fuck yourself'.
Anyway, back to the details of my get-rich-quick plan. A time machine might seem preposterous but, according to the Mindvalley Manifesting Summit's website, manifesting means 'bending time and reality through intention, intuition and aligned action'. So manifest the damn thing and start getting that vagina candle money!
Perhaps you're wondering if it wouldn't be easier to just manifest a bunch of cash instead? Yes, come to think of it, probably. Although, honestly, you shouldn't take financial advice from me. I started my working life as a corporate lawyer, then went into advertising, and now I am a freelance writer. Instead of climbing the career ladder chasing pay rises I slithered down it chasing pay cuts. Still, here I am living the dream and writing about vaginas for a living. It's very punk rock!
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Ohio review – spine-tingling folk harmonies and life's big questions
Music is a lifeline for Abigail and Shaun Bengson. Baring their souls through song, Ohio is introduced as a 'death concert' in response to the indie-folk musicians' young son asking what happens when we die. But this bittersweet story of family, faith and loss is almost ferociously about grabbing hold of life. The Bengsons create harmonies that glide directly to the top of your spine. Both clearly feel the music in their bones, but it's Abigail who shows it, her body unable to resist moving to the tumbling scales they create together, her bright, beaming face turned up to the sky. Director Caitlin Sullivan helps the pair gracefully shape their story on stage, treading softly between gig, presentation and choir rehearsal. The potted narrative sticks closer to Shaun, who is the drily comic balance to Abigail's bounding enthusiasm. Guiding us through his repressive Lutheran upbringing, he eases out of the religion's grasp but holds on to what faith means for his father, and what his father means to him. Narrowing our focus, the show homes in on Shaun's degenerative hearing loss. In one revelatory scene, their microphones are modulated for us to understand what Shaun hears now, certain tones and consonants absent to him, then thickening and distorting as that blank mugginess will intensify over time. With creative captions that tremble as the sensory experience distorts, this slow theft is devastatingly wrought. The pair create the atmosphere of holding our hands throughout, with angelic, ululating folk song accompanying the thoughtful ways they see and explain life. Their story serves as both a formal introduction to them as a couple as well as a deeply spiritual meditation on the world we live in. A revenant hush accompanies everything they say. A song to Shaun's choirmistress who helped a shy, almost unspoken child unfurl is shattering. Made freshly aware of time slipping through our fingers, no one wants to miss a moment. At Upstairs at Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, until 24 August. Then at Young Vic, London, 30 September-24 October All our Edinburgh festival reviews
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
That Alien, Sound review – super-kooky indie comedy puts sound-wave ET in woman's body
'You continue to play this alien part, and I'm fucking over it – I've had enough.' On that note, uptight boyfriend Shannon (Will Tranfo) kicks the woman he thought was his girlfriend out of the car – and perhaps echoes the audience's thoughts about this grindingly zany indie sci-fi comedy. And that's only 10 minutes into Brando Topp's directing debut, in which Mika (Mia Danelle) is rocking out to gnarly sounds on her headphones when her body is hijacked by an alien soundwave that was formerly stuck in space listening to the vibrations coming from Earth. That Alien, Sound plays out like a lo-fi LA sweding of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Stupefied at having a body, the wave – later dubbed Sound – bugs Shannon by chucking tissues around the car and trying to grab the steering wheel. Back at her bewildered parents' house, she marvels at the five senses and, excited by a fried breakfast, burns herself on the pan. Her brother Deyo (Deyo Forteza) takes her to his band's jam session; a chance for the once-disembodied oscillation to be in the presence of real live music. This cosmic body-swap scenario is infuriatingly loose, with no obvious reason for the soundwave gimmick other than the innate kookiness. Self-infatuated scenes sprawl out for too long with all the discipline of an Echo Park hipster improv group after a long night on the edibles. Sound, indignant at what she finds on terra firma, is increasingly gripped by outraged soliloquies about climate change and human megalomania; these are the kind of trite interventions that give wokeness a bad name. But matters do pick up in the film's final phase, as Sound, Shannon and Deyo head to a music festival to make a radio transmission that they hope will bring Mika back. As the story coalesces around her and Shannon's failing relationship, the alien conceit starts to make more sense in terms of a strangeness in his partner he feels threatened by, and the new identity she is seeking. Even some of the heavy quirk – turning up at the jamboree cosplaying as Mozart – starts to seem charming as Topp's directing locks into place around actual themes. It goes to show: inside every annoyingly tricksy indie comedy is a decent road movie trying to get out. That Alien, Sound is on digital platforms from 18 August.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Dawn Dusk review – handbag designer deals with grief over murdered sister and dead friend
Chicago-based Chelli Look, the subject at the centre of this diffuse documentary, seems like a nice person, with a talent for designing and making minimalist leather handbags. Not long out of high school, the best friend with whom she planned to start a business died in a car accident. Then her elder sister, Megan Henneberg, was murdered in 2007 by her husband Brian, leaving Chelli, her parents, siblings and extended family to deal with the harrowing loss. And yet, no matter how much sympathy you might feel for Chelli and her family's trauma, or interest you might have in her bagmaking skills, or engagement with her as a person, somehow those core components don't coalesce to make this feature-length documentary feel vital or even especially necessary. A self-described introvert, Chelli herself is a pretty opaque figure although she speaks quite expressively and intelligently about her approach to design. We only get tiny glimpses of her home life with husband David, so she's not really developed as a 'character' sufficiently to carry the film. Meanwhile, the story around her sister's murder has something of a shroud around it, which is understandable to an extent, but then turns the film into a strange fan dance, alternating revelation with concealment about the facts of the case. In the end, the fact that Chelli found a way to forgive her brother-in-law in a religious sense, seems to be the big takeaway, but the wafty haziness around the whole issue reduces the murder to a brutal but incidental noise off-screen. The most engaging parts of the film are the scenes where Chelli is at work at her fancy industrial Juki sewing machine in her alarmingly tidy, sepulchre-white studio. The hum of the machinery is as seductively lulling as an ASMR video and watching Chelli buy leather hides is pure shopping pornography. Even more visually lush is the sequence where Chelli goes off to Florence to take a course in leatherwork and design to refine her skills, offering the film-makers a chance to shoot one of the world's more photogenic cities at crepuscular times of the day. All of which makes the surprise ending even more baffling, denying viewers the redemption–through–small-business-ownership ending the film appears to be striving for. Dawn Dusk is on digital platforms from 15 August.
