Goop Clean Beauty

November 7, 2016
The editors at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, a weekly newsletter turned multi-faceted lifestyle resource, have consolidated their best lifestyle tips into a single helpful volume with the aim of helping people detox and develop healthy habits. The book emphasizes holistic living, which means that the wholesome recipes work optimally when used in concert with hair and skin treatments, yoga, healthful make-up, and beauty supplements. The plentiful recipes that serve this end offer creative ways to combine the limited foods that fall under their narrowly defined culinary purview. Right off the bat, however, the no-nos are established, and the list is extensive: no alcohol, caffeine, dairy, eggs, beef, pork, shellfish, raw fish, gluten, soy, potatoes, or tomatoes, and that’s just the beginning. The book even includes a “mani-pedi manifesto” outlining chemical-free polishing products. This is a helpful book targeted at an elite contingent who have no worries about food budgets.

January 1, 2017

Beginning as a weekly online newsletter in 2008, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop (goop.com) has grown into a lifestyle brand with a skin care line and clothing label, successful to the point of parody. The brand emphasizes that beauty comes from the inside, and each chapter in this book takes the same path, starting with advice and recipes for detoxing and clean eating. Following this base of personal care, "Next Level Detoxing" covers practices such as yoga and foam rolling, which complement a clean diet and help move toxins through and out of the body. Later chapters focus on clean beauty products and ways to achieve a natural style with hair and makeup. These sections also offer recommendations for varied skin care issues: aging, sensitive, "breakout prone." Though targeting a distinct aesthetic, the beauty, health, and consumer guidance is mainstream in nature and the overall tone is relatable and realistic, noting that clean living and beauty take effort. VERDICT Building on the success of Paltrow's cookbooks and the Goop brand, this book will appeal to readers looking for advice, as well as those simply curious to see how the website translates into print.--Meagan Storey, Virginia Beach

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016
Goop began as an e-mail its creator, the actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who writes this book's foreword, sent to friends, containing recipes, places, and things she loved. Eight years later, it's a website and lifestyle brand, with a weekly newsletter reaching nearly a million devoted readers. Based on the company's belief that beauty ends with perfect hair and cosmetics but begins with health, the full-color book is structured the same way. It starts with many detox-friendly recipes (free of gluten, dairy, added sugar, etc.) and moves into text-based sections on the importance of gut health, exercise, and healthy sleep habits before addressing the beauty sections readers might be looking for: skin, makeup, and hair. Goop's got the skinny on fascia, colonics, and surfactants, often in short Q&A sections authored by doctors and fitness gurus or in bulleted lists. Choruses of We hear you and Let's be real will have readers feeling right at home with a book from the brand they trust as a realistic voice for how to put health first while managing modern life's demands.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)