Gwyneth Paltrow started Goop in 2008 because she didn’t want to be known for “making out with Matt Damon.” I wouldn't want that on my tombstone either, but I also don’t know if I’d prefer “This candle smells like my vagina” or “I once told women to stick a jade egg inside their vagina." Still, such is the magical and frustrating world of Goop: Full of bizarre health claims, $275,000 lunar rocks, and Paltrow herself, who recently claimed to have decreased her internal age just by fasting for five days in an episode of her new Netflix series, the goop lab with Gwyneth Paltrow (yes, it’s stylised like a Billie Eilish track), the website has eclipsed mockery.
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“The Health-Span Plan,” episode 4 of the mini-series, follows Paltrow and two of her top Goopers, Elise Loehnen and Wendy Lauria, on their journey to eternal youth. Well, not quite, but basically. After interviewing a professor who studies how we age, the three women go on restrictive diets to see if they can decrease their body’s physical age while still remaining their biological age. (This show is indeed rooted in reality, despite some of the bizarre health claims made.) And while many of us would be happy to simply watch Paltrow, wearing a cashmere sweater and countless stacked gold rings (this must be a specific type of ASMR), writhe while eating dehydrated soups, the real highlight of the episode — and frankly of the show itself — is an actual youthful person: Apple Martin.
An icon before she could even talk, Apple made national news just for being given the name Apple. At a time where my current go-to playlist is full of names like Lizzo and Billie, and I casually find myself wondering, “What’s Stormi doing right now?,” were we ever so young to think “Apple '' was a newsworthy and controversial name? Now 15, and celebrating her sixteenth birthday in May (hello, fellow Taurus), Apple has successfully remained, as far as I can tell, a normal teen. Yes, she goes out barefoot to get matcha with her dad, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, and his girlfriend Dakota Johnson, and posts TikToks while vacationing in Aspen with half of Hollywood’s most famous families, but other than that, she’s just a Gen-Zer with a mum who is very into wellness and food trends. (I can relate.)
So, imagine my utter surprise and delight when halfway through her mom’s fast-mimicking diet, a raspy voice of a Youth Who Is Cooler Than Me starts giving her mum a pep talk. “You just ate dinner,” Apple says, filming this portion of the episode on a handheld camera, vlogger style. “You had 500 calories today. How many days do you have left?” she asks, a voice of reason in the midst of her mother’s extremely intense meal plan, which I’d urge people to not try at home. Two more days, Paltrow says weakly, dramatically throwing herself across her extremely clean, white couch. “You got it!” she says, before hyping up all the admittedly gross sounding food her uom has left to eat before the diet’s over. “Gorgeous,” she says of the baby shoe sized box her mom’s daily meals come in. “Yassssss,” she cheers at the sight of “dessert,” a snack-sized protein bar. Together, they rejoice over four! bags! of! tea! And then just like that, Apple’s gone, and it’s back to the Goop offices.
Apple doesn’t pop up again, and we never even see her face, presumably because she is still young and not quite ready for her own Netflix docu-series. Her Instagram is still private, and her TikTok presence consists solely of attempts at the app’s viral dances. (She really hits her stride in this one.) None of her social media is meant for the public eye, and reveals little about her personality, except for this very purposeful — and powerful — Goop cameo. It’s a little teaser of the new generation of talent among us. With the family and connections she has, it’s only a matter of time before the most recent photo of her available on Getty is no longer the one of her as a toddler wearing noise-cancelling headphones in the front row at a Coldplay concert.