Gwyneth Paltrow Has No Time for Your Judgments on Anti-Aging Routines

Phillip Faraone, Getty Images for goop

If you've been considering pursuing an anti-aging treatment, just know that Gwyneth Paltrow supports you. The goop creator—who tells HelloGiggles that she wants to "age as gracefully as possible" but appreciates a bit of added help in her anti-aging routine—believes women should do whatever the hell they want with their bodies and their beauty routines.

"I just don't believe that women should judge themselves or other women for the choices that they make," she explains. "Whether they be beauty choices, or breastfeeding choices, or clothing choices, or whatever. I really feel that women should be allowed to make the choices in life that make them feel the most themselves and the most fully integrated."

Recently, the lifestyle guru partnered with Xeomin, an anti-wrinkle injection brand, to further tout confidence and acceptance. After having a negative experience with fillers when she entered her 40s, Paltrow says she was hesitant to ever try it again. However, her desire to slow the aging process found her trying Xeomin—a uniquely purified, more natural injectable—and deciding she "loved it."

While Paltrow strongly believes that women should feel empowered through their looks and actions, she also understands how hard it can be for them to take up space in the world and be proud of who they are. She has advice, though, for those who haven't quite nailed it yet.

"It goes back to the days that I started to really let go of old judgments that I was holding against myself," she says of how she built her own confidence. "We hold these judgements against ourselves and they kind of compound and they make us walk around feeling like we are not good enough. And it's hard to feel confident and fully you if you feel that way."

Paltrow acknowledged that making the change can be "a process," but believes it's worth it to find that inner strength. She says even her meditation app she uses is a healthy reminder to keep improving. "There was a little class in forgiveness that I was listening to every day," she says, "and I think that's a really important part of getting to feel fully confident in yourself."

Confidence, self-love, and support are all part of Paltrow's self-care routine—which also includes simple pleasures like exercise and eating right. Though she and husband Brad Falchuk spend of lot of time on self-care, it's not necessarily something she's drilling into the heads of her kids, Apple and Moses, yet. "We try to model it more than talk about it," she says. "Teenagers get so annoyed when you try to tell them anything."

Paltrow makes it easy on the kids, though, by demonstrating the best ways to live healthy lives—with a little exercise and nutritional foods. The star has been showing off her foodie instincts for years on social media and in her cookbooks, but when she and Falchuk both tested positive for COVID last year, cooking and other self-care activities took a backseat to basic recovery. In February, she opened up in a post on the goop website about her COVID experience and the lasting effects it's had on her, especially the fatigue. She wrote that she and Falchuk had the virus "early on" and tells HelloGiggles that she didn't even know what was wrong at the time.

"When we had COVID, we didn't know it was COVID," she says. "Whenever I get sick, I always try to add more self-care into the program and really hydrate, but by the time we knew it was COVID, we were already kind of better, at least from the acute portion of it."

She did reveal, though, that Falchuk lost his senses of taste and smell for nine months, joking that she could "cook anything and [he] won't even taste it."

The two of them are on the other side of their COVID diagnoses now, luckily, though there's still a bit of tiredness. Now that she can, Paltrow says she's been able to weave in her self-care activities more and more, including simple joys like going for walks and doing yoga—and demonstrating positive behaviors for her kids. "They see that we try to take care of ourselves," she says, "I feel like self-care has been last on everybody's list [this past year], but it's important to do. It's important to remember to try to do it."