Gwyneth Paltrow on the Powerful Message Behind Her Vagina Candles: Women 'Deserve to Have That Agency'

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Gwyneth Paltrow knows how to get people talking. And she maintains that Goop's buzzy "vagina" candle line is meant to spark conversation.

On Sunday, Paltrow, 49, spoke with TODAY about her career pivot from Oscar-winning actress to the CEO of Goop, the lifestyle brand she founded initially as a newsletter in 2008.

Goop's best-known products include a $75 10.5 oz candle labeled "This Smells Like My Vagina," per the company's website; the candle, which is made with geranium, citrusy bergamot and "cedar absolutes juxtaposed with Damask rose and ambrette seed," boasts a name that catches the eye enough that Paltrow asked TODAY whether she was allowed to say its title on morning television.

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"This candle is really like that provocation to say like, 'It's amazing to be a woman in every way. It's amazing to have that kind of power and you deserve to have that agency,'" Paltrow told TODAY's Willie Geist about the product.

Goop. Inset: Getty

As Paltrow has grown more heavily involved with Goop — she took on the company's CEO role in 2016 — she has almost entirely stepped away from acting. Paltrow, who won an Oscar for her role in 1998's Shakespeare in Love has not appeared in a feature film since 2019's Avengers: Endgame.

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Paltrow said in her interview with TODAY that it was around the time she won that award that her place in the public eye went from "people kind of being curious about you or discovering you or rooting for you to it all being upended, and people really wanting to tear you down and take great pleasure in it."

"Which ends up being a really beautiful lesson in knowing who you are," Paltrow added. "Loving the people you love. Being totally in integrity. And like f*** everybody else."

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While Paltrow starred in Netflix's 2020 series The Politician, co-created by her husband Brad Falchuk, she said in the interview that she "never felt very, fully comfortable being in the public eye to that degree" and would likely only act on screen moving forward if Falchuk asked her to play a role in one of his projects.

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"I really don't miss it all. I think I'm so lucky that I got to do it, and I'm sure I still will at some point," Paltrow said of her acting career in the interview. "The team is always trying to get me to do a movie, but I really love what I do and I love how immediate it is and how … we're able to create product out of thin air that we believe in so much."

Paltrow also indicated she would be interested in performing on the stage in a future acting role in order to fulfill a promise to her mother, actress Blythe Danner.

"I did promise my mother at some point before I die, I told her I would go and do a play so … I'm gonna deliver on that promise at some point," she told TODAY.

Paltrow's move away from acting has been developing since at least 2019, when she echoed similar sentiments about transitioning away from acting during a conversation with Harry Kargman, founder and CEO of Kargo, for a panel at Advertising Week New York.

"I wouldn't say I'm that passionate about it anymore.… I have had a lot of good luck and a lot of hard work, which led to a really good film career.... At a certain point I felt like it wasn't what I wanted to do … so I did a little pivot," she said at the time of creating Goop.