No, Gwyneth Paltrow's Candle Won't Smell Like Her Vagina

There is something deeply wrong with Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina-scented candle story. Well, something aside from the entire story, from concept to completion. So very many, many sites are reporting as if Gwyneth Paltrow stood over a tub wrenching drops of pure extract from her vagina, so that people who bought the now completely sold out candle could fill their home with the aroma of Gwyneth Paltrow's puss. Here's the mistake they're making: "This Smells Like My Vagina" is the candle's name, not an actual claim made by any single person, Gwyneth Paltrow included.

Home fragrance brands give their products pretentious, aspirational names that often have nothing to do with the scent. Like how a candle made of dumpster juice and raccoon turds can be called Parisian Stroll. It's just pleasant imagery for marketing purposes. It seems a fairly easy concept to grasp, even when discussing Paltrow's cooter candle. Yet so many sites claim the candle smells like her vagina in the headline, when even the body of the article will feature a quote from the Goop website that explains what the candle really is:

"This candle started as a joke between perfumer Douglas Little and GP. The two were working on a fragrance, and she blurted out, 'Uhhh..this smells like a vagina' - but evolved into a funny, gorgeous, sexy, and beautifully unexpected scent. (That turned out to be perfect as a candle)."

So Gwyneth Paltrow made a dumb vagina joke, everyone around her chuckled dutifully (fearing that she'd sic her shaman on them if they did not), and then they made a fortune selling that joke as a candle. No, buying the candle will not be like face planting straight into Gwyneth Paltrow's lap. She knows her audience, and understands that they want a candle that smells like the cartoonish ideal of feminism as imagined by wildly wealthy, pseudoscience-loving Manhattan moms who get their news from Minions memes on Facebook. Of course, everyone would've been able to figure this out if they used just a little bit of their critical thinking skills to piece together that a vagina does don't smell like geranium, citrus bergamot, cedar absolutes, Damask rose, and ambrette seed. If that's what your vagina smells like, you're spending too much time in your herb garden. That's what Galaxy-brained neo-hippies pretend women's genitals smell like, in their magical fantasy world where the vagina is not a metaphorical flower but an actual, literal flower -- one with a scent so powerful it can revitalize a bathroom after a vicious crap.

Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. And now you can listen to the first episode on Youtube!