Asking me to talk about makeup is like asking Kim Kardashian to discuss quantum physics. But I do know enough to recognize who should and should not offer up makeup tips to the peasants. I would ask Kirsten Dunst, or Jaimie Alexander, or hell, even Kim Kardashian for makeup tips before I ever asked Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth’s makeup is like her hair: consistently awful. But last year, Gwyneth announced that she was co-creating an organic beauty/makeup line, and now she’s launching the line, called Juice Beauty. To celebrate, Gwyneth and her partners gave interviews to Forbes.

Gwyneth’s makeup concerns: “I wear makeup heavily in my work. And now that I’m post-40, I’ve started to wear it more often in my day-to-day life. But once my lifestyle website, Goop, started investigating toxicity in these products… I was stunned. I genuinely thought makeup was safe, but that’s not the case.”

She worked with investor Amanda Eilian and Juice Beauty founding partner Karen Behnke, who says: “Juice Beauty had been in a place to hire what we call a ‘Triple A List’ celebrity partner for a long time. But I couldn’t help feeling, ‘That’s not us.’ We wanted someone who could actually walk the walk of our brand… and Gwyneth embodied not only the entrepreneurial spirit and business savvy we were looking for, but also the true passion for clean, but fun, living.”

Why Gwyneth didn’t just go solo with her own organic makeup line: “I honestly fell in love with Karen. She’s a mom; she’s authentic. She has such incredible expertise in the space… You have to remember Goop is a startup. Our biggest problem is that we have too much opportunity, but we can’t do everything at once. When you’ve taken on investment and are trying to scale at a certain place, you don’t want to get diluted down by too many options…It would have taken us far longer to execute on our own. Mario Batali, who is like my spiritual godfather, once told me, ‘You don’t have to make all the money.’ And it’s true: I think people often feel they’ll be more successful, at least financially, if they go it on their own… but for us to be able to use Karen’s expertise — and for Karen to be able to use my name and my platform — we’ll all go further.”

Organic prices: “In the next few years, you’re going to see the prices of organic going down as the production quality goes up. Which is exactly what we want to see. We don’t want eating carcinogen free food, for example, to be a luxury. It’s insane, and it should be the same with beauty.”

[From Forbes]

The piece goes on and on and you would think Gwyneth had discovered the cure for cancer. You can see the Juice Beauty line here at JuiceBeauty.com. The price point is rich for my taste, but then again, I buy all my beauty essentials at the grocery store or CVS. The skincare stuff seems to be consistently in the $30-50 range, and organic mascara and eyeliner will set you back $18-24. It doesn’t seem like this stuff will be available anywhere other than online as well. Say what you will about Salma Hayek, but when she launched her makeup line, she made sure it would be affordable to middle class women, and accessible at places where they shop, like CVS.

It’s worth noting that none of the non-organic makeup concerns came up when Gwyneth was getting paid by Max Factor to be the face of their brand. I tend to be conspiratorial, but I think that’s why Gwyneth launched Juice Beauty in 2016 – because after 2015, her Max Factor contract ran out and now she can be the face of Juice Beauty.

Photos courtesy of WENN.