Name: Sex Dust
Appearance: A little brown jar filled with 2oz/56g of powder.
Available from: Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop.com.
Price: $60/£42.50
That’s a lot of money for not very much powder. What does it do? Well, it calls itself an “aphrodisiac warming potion”.
Sounds good! How does it work? Basically you dissolve some in a drink. Then the dust “is designed to stimulate and cultivate sexual flow in both men and women … send sensitivity and power to all the right places, supporting primordial energy and vital essence”.
Fantastic! Just a couple of quick questions before we begin our three-day bonk binge. What actually are “sexual flow”, “primordial energy” and “vital essence”? Oh, they’re just some deeply scientific things that the manufacturer, Gwyneth’s friend Amanda Chantal Bacon, likes to talk about.
Right. And people will spend $60 on this stuff, will they? It seems so. Sex Dust is currently out of stock on Goop, even though a lecturer in human nutrition at Reading University describes himself as “rather sceptical” about its efficacy. “The products throw a lot of Chinese medicinal products together for which the evidence is primarily anecdotal,” Dr Danny Commane told wired.co.uk, after casting an eye over other Moon Juice products.
And Moon Juice is? It’s Bacon’s very funny company, “a cosmic beacon for those seeking out beauty, wellness and longevity” which sells “miraculous lifestyle tools” to rich people in California. This week Moon Juice recommends that you build an actual shrine to their products. “Create a simple altar to honour them out in the open,” it says, “to encourage sprinkling, nibbling and blending with whimsy of the spices, herbs and petals”.
Surely they also provide a good evidence-base for their claims? Not really. To be fair, it’s hard to give an evidence-base for statements such as: “I like to think of Moon Juice as an etheric potion that is coming from the cosmos to save the entire human race.”
Yes. The closest they get is a mention of Bacon’s own “transformative experience – backed up by extensive blood tests, the scrutiny of several physicians, renewed feelings of vitality, and a shift in my personality, immunity, appearance and thought”.
I think we’d all get renewed feelings of vitality if we could shift 2oz of dust at 40 quid a time! I think so, too.
Do say: “There’s one hypno-birthed every minute.”
Don’t say: “Is that why the NHS still spends millions on homeopathy?”
