S2 E7: Green Eggs and Scams

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previously on the dream

It drives me nuts because there's enough science-y words that people who don't know anything about quantum mechanics will assume that there must be some science behind it, which ignores so much basic rudimentary biology and quite basic quantum mechanics that it's ludicrous.

And you have people tricked because they assume that, like, an MRI machine uses quantum mechanics.

Cancer treatment uses quantum mechanics.

So there must be something in this oil that also uses quantum mechanics when there isn't.

There's just nothing there.

It's just a lie.

We can't talk about wellness without talking about this one lady and her inspirational weller-than-you'll ever be lifestyle.

Warning, she's edgy.

One of her friends is a rapper.

She's fought the law and the law won and she swears the fuck out of shit.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about the daughter of Blythe Danner and goddaughter of Steven Spielberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, who has risen from the opposite of obscurity to become the host of her very own brand new streaming television program, the Goop Lab.

So, what happens in a workshop?

Everyone gets off.

What the fuck are you doing, Achieve?

What we try to do at Goop is explore ideas that may seem out there or too scary.

Are you guys ready to go out in the field and make a raucous?

Just another day at the office.

I had an exorcism.

Oh, wow.

It's unregulated.

Should I be scared?

We're here one time, one life.

Before launching her website, Goop, in 2008, Paltrow was a wealthy actress and a mother married to a wealthy rock star.

In the early days of Goop, it was mostly a blog and not yet the Amazon of wellness it's become.

And one of the early features on that blog was a day in the life sort of thing.

Gwyneth described the genesis of this idea, quote, one of our readers emailed Goop about finding a good balance between having a career and being a mom, which got me thinking about the other extremely busy working mothers I know and what their days might be like.

I asked some friends how they do the mother's special, everything all at once, end quote.

Gwyneth published a diary about how she does it all, and it's maybe one of the most unrelatable things I've ever read.

Starting with how her toddler wakes up after 8 a.m.

Quote, I went up to rouse the little man from slumber, and he quite happily got up and crawled into my arms.

We got downstairs and I made him a quick breakfast of eggs and toast, followed by a spoonful of lemon-flavored flax oil that I try to remember to give him every morning.

Then she takes the kids to school and When all was well, I dodged off as fast as possible, but was still late to my 9 a.m.

workout.

Did dance aerobics for 45 minutes then all of the butt lifts and the like.

Rushed upstairs to have a shower.

Doing my post-workout stretch while the conditioner was doing its magic on my hair to combine activities slash save time.

Okay so her 9 a.m.

gym appointment 9 a.m.

that she was worried about being late for was in her house.

Got it.

Very helpful for busy working moms out there.

Gwyneth closes out her day by putting the kids down to bed, but not before, quote, the kids indulge in a super sugary cupcake before bed, but I don't feel too bad because they had a brown rice stir-fry for dinner with a baked sweet potato on the side.

It's all about balance, exclamation point.

This is the unattainable, aspirational talk that launched a thousand influencers.

and a collection of wellness products sold on goop that run the gamut from silly, a candle that says it smells like Gwynneth's vagina, hopefully only while it's burning and not, you know, like right after you blow it out, to more dubious items, like a $66 jade egg that claimed to balance hormones and regulate menstrual cycles if you shove it up your hoo-ha.

Here's Gwyneth pitching the jade egg on Jimmy Kimmel in 2016.

The jade egg is an ancient Chinese practice where women insert the jade egg in their lady parts.

Right.

And to help tone the pelvic floor.

How does it help do that?

I don't know.

I need to start with a a Jade Egg practice.

You've never been on this website before, have you?

You sell a lot of things?

We sell tons of them.

And there are women who are really good at practicing this, and they say that it's good for balancing hormones and all kinds of amazing benefits.

Yeah, yeah.

And the best part of it is, I don't know if you see, but up in the corner it says, item is non-returnable.

The jade egg wasn't and isn't the only only thing worth your side eye on their website.

Enough sketchy claims have been made on Goop to inspire academic research into the company.

One study comes from a team at the University of Florida.

My name is Amanda Castrinos.

I am a health communications scholar at the University of Florida.

And you wrote a study?

I did.

Along with a research team, we analyzed all of the articles that were published under the health tab of the GOOP website.

So she has a a section called wellness and then under that there's like health specifically.

So we looked at all the articles that have been published from the founding of the site up to the time of our analysis which was in the fall of 2017.

How many articles was that?

265 articles total had been published but as we reviewed them we ended up taking out 65 of them either due to they weren't relevant and there was a couple about relationships or things like book reviews.

So we wanted to specifically look at the health advice that she was giving.

So we ended up with 200.

How did you come up with this idea?

Ironically, from another podcast.

It was Sawbones, which has a physician and her husband talk about different medical claims.

And they did a bonus episode and they happened to talk about the jade egg that Gwyneth Paltrow had been selling.

and talking about how it's really bad for you and it can give you toxic shock syndrome, but she's still selling it and it's $60.

And I thought that was ridiculous.

So I wanted to look at all of the other things that she was saying.

So we did the analysis, structured thematic analysis, where you kind of look at what are the messages that are coming forth in all of these articles?

What are the patterns?

But we also did another study where we compared the articles to this criteria from Health News Review that looks at all the different claims and like what's the quality of the evidence?

What are the types of experts that they have on there?

Are they disease mongering?

What are they using as their standards of evidence?

and those sorts of things what is disease mongering so that would be when you are creating or exaggerating the prevalence of a disease this is from an article on food intolerance okay the article is called demystifying the diet she says a short list of symptoms that could point to food intolerance includes stomach pain reflux ear infections frequent illness red cheeks eczema joint pain frequent diarrhea and constipation asthma temper tantrums, fuzzy thinking, fatigue, headaches, failure to thrive, excessive gas, and sleep disturbances.

And so anybody is going to have at least one of those things.

I mean, I definitely have a failure to thrive.

And then let's just talk about your thesis and the big question that you had in this study.

You know, there's the theory of parasocial interaction.

Parasocial relationships are defined as relationships between media users and media figures that resemble typical social relationships, even though there's no social interaction happening.

The user is viewing the celebrity as a friend.

They're viewing it like they would view a regular social relationship.

And in order to maintain or enhance that connection, they will adopt the celebrity's values, beliefs, or behaviors to try and make them feel closer to them.

And there's a lot of studies that show that it does have an impact on health behavior specifically.

With Magic Johnson, when he went public about his HIV diagnosis, it changed the way people saw HIV and it changed the way people perceived the risk of contracting HIV for heterosexuals.

With Angelina Jolie,

when she published her op-ed in May of 2013 about getting a preventative mastectomy, there was a two-fold increase in referrals for breast cancer testing from May to October of that year in comparison to that same period in the previous year.

I think it's a bigger issue now more than ever because I looked at this, did another paper with this theory in the context of sports.

And the way that we have access to these figures' lives because of social media is so different to when, you know, all of these original studies were being done and these ideas were being developed that I can't even imagine how much more potent it is now that you can have complete access to this person's life and feel like you really, really know them.

And it's not like a mental disorder.

It's just a regular human behavior.

Yeah, definitely.

That was something they noticed at first.

They were like, oh, this must only be in people who are lonely or people who have deficiencies in their actual social interaction, but that's not true at all.

It's all of us.

It can happen to anybody.

And it happens with fictional characters as well.

That's surprising.

Who are we talking about?

Oh, my gosh.

Really?

I want to comment on your podcast about that.

Yeah.

It started, one of the first studies about it was looking at how people related to characters in a television program in Israel and like the way that they viewed these characters as their friends because they reminded them of their friends.

And so that's when they first started noticing it.

So it really does have an impact on health behavior specifically.

So that's why I kind of decided to look at it because I wanted to see what she was saying and if people who paid attention to her and listened to her and had a relationship with her in their minds, it might affect some of their health behavior.

Amanda's team found that to be true.

No duh.

When Gwyneth says she does something, we do it.

But more more interesting to me was another part of her study, a more nefarious finding.

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That's basically a full-time job just scrolling.

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So, Goop is a contextual commerce brand,

meaning that the editorial sections and the sales section are merged, which kind of puts it in a journalistic gray area.

Jessica Alba's Honest Company brand is contextual commerce and Martha Seward is contextual commerce, but I think the fact that this is happening in the health realm is bad.

So this is in 173 of the 200 articles we looked at.

55% of them directly linked to an item for sale.

Wow.

And I think it would be, if you did it today, I think it would be even higher because the period that we were looking at was before there was a Goop store as well.

Goop has done a bit of a redesign recently, and we'll talk about why in a bit.

They were forced to.

But there are many avenues you can take to find both information and products to buy.

You could click on the shop tab, of course, or you could click on the health tab or wellness or detox and find articles tagged read and shop, essentially taking you back to the online store whether you wanted to go there or not.

Fasting is very trendy right now, and it's been written about a lot on Goop.

If you're into fasting, just don't eat or whatever.

Or go on Gwyneth's website, read about the benefits of fasting in various articles, and before you close the tab, don't forget to buy a five-day fasting mimicking kit they're selling to quote, take the burden out of fasting for only $249

for less than a week's worth of not actually food for one person.

And the ones that didn't link to a specific article, you know, they might talk about a specific sauna that Gwyneth was going to in New York or a specific type of reflexologist or Reiki healer or something that would come in and talk about their services in the article.

So even if it's not linking directly to a goop product, it's directing you to something.

There's a product placement.

Yeah.

You know, I used to be a beauty blogger and we got into some health stuff on different blogs I worked at at the hairpin and Jezebel.

And we were morally and ethically obligated to put advertorial content, anything that did link to a product.

We had to headline it as such.

Like it needed a very distinct disclaimer.

We would get advertisers that would say, we really want you to like look at our skin cream or whatever.

And we'd say, great, we're broke this month.

We can do it.

We can do it.

But it's going to have this word on top of it that says, advertisement written by Jane.

This is an ad.

Don't get it twisted.

That doesn't happen on Goop.

Well, it's really strange because that is there in some of the articles.

So she has a partnership with Tropicana at one point.

And they do a bunch of recipes.

She has another one.

Oh, yeah, Tropicana, the like picture of health of like sugar added concentrated year-old orange juice

okay so she had one tropicana yeah and she had another one with bare minerals as well but the ones that are connected to her site I mean she really doesn't talk about it there's a series of articles when she first launched her brand of vitamins

So the pre-pregnancy detox vitamins, the

high school genes, where it's supposed to snap your metabolism back to high school.

When she first launched those, she had different article series where she talked about them.

And then it didn't really say it was an ad, but at the end, I think it was kind of clear that like this was designed to lead you to the vitamins.

In addition to disease mongering, in addition to trying to cast as wide a net as possible, of symptoms in the hopes that they'll land on one that you resonate with and you'll think, oh my gosh, I have, you know, Epstein-Barr or I have adrenal fatigue, which are two diseases they did major issues on they also tried to make you doubt conventional medicine so this was an article about the rise of chronic Lyme and what to do about it

and Goop says I don't blame doctors that they don't have the time to spend enough time with patients and treat them properly but this is the face of medicine today it's a checklist system that creates the game of ping pong tell me your symptoms and I'll throw back some medicine and it's getting worse and worse does this remind you of anything remember a few episodes ago when we were talking about hospital births versus home births?

The home birth proponents argued that doctors are on a clock and they'll put you on that clock and force you by the nature of their business because it is a business to make decisions that aren't good for your health but are good for their bottom line.

And the doctor we talked to essentially said, what in the world?

That's not what doctors are for.

Goop is muddling around in that same argument and stands to make maybe a lot more money than your doctor would by selling you something that your doctor wouldn't.

So who's lying and who's got the agenda?

So then they push a lot of alternative treatments.

All of these are kind of internet connected with each other.

So there's an interview that Gwyneth gave that was published on the health site that said, you know, there might not be board certified physicians doing double-blind studies that can lay out the results in the same way.

The empirical evidence is anecdotal, sort of stuff that they're talking about.

But you'll have people who are really resistant to the idea like it's better to be on five prescription drugs than to maybe cut gluten out of your diet.

So kind of trying to say that, you know, we're pushing these things that other people aren't thinking of.

We're thinking of it outside of the box.

And that's why you should buy our $60 Jade Egg.

Because they're innovators and they're not part of the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

Right.

They just make $90 custom vitamins that are supposed to make you fit into your genes from high school.

My jeans from high school, by the way, were Z Cavaricis.

They were very cute at the time.

You couldn't pay me enough to put them back on.

So, okay, were there any other examples of?

Yes, there was a lot of focus on eating clean, being clean.

There were a lot of recipes and things that they were selling that had to do with detoxing.

They were selling me pre-pregnancy detoxes.

So they said stuff.

This is an article about the importance of a pre-pregnancy detox.

They said the toxic load that we've built up prior to pregnancy can have an impact on our children.

We also know from, quote, washout studies, which look at what happens when someone switches from conventional to organic food that just in the span of a few days we can eliminate significant amounts of toxins from our bodies particularly herbicides and pesticides we consume with our food and thus lower systemic toxic levels so it's saying that as without this detox not only are you have all these herbicides and pesticides and toxins but it's also going to harm your baby

which i think is just another level of manipulation And that goes into, I think, one of the biggest things about Goop is that it portrays Juennette Paltrow as this ideal, sophisticated woman who's focused on her health, who's all about helping other women.

But at the same time, they're posting all these articles about anti-aging and different ways to help you with weight loss.

And it just kind of, it's such a contradictory message to me.

That women should be taking care of themselves as long as that also involves looking like Gweneth Paltrow?

Yeah, we are the only ones that are listening to you because women are not listened to in the medical system, but we're here for you.

And by the way,

you're fat.

Yeah, exactly.

There's nothing more disheartening than the sight of love handles filling over your pants or a pooched belly.

That's from a goop article.

How can you have both of those things on your website?

Or shaming women for getting T-sections and not being able to breastfeed at the same time as you're trying to say that you're the only outlet that's there for them.

You're the only people who care about them or listening to them.

Yeah, no, we're going to listen to you.

Your doctors aren't listening.

Also, remember:

nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels.

Except for this protein powder I'm about to tell you.

Can I tell you one more weight loss quote that I just can't handle?

Love it.

So Gwenness House was talking about herself here.

You know, sometimes she'd sign the articles GP, so you know it's her versus the goop team.

But she says, in January of 2007, I decided I'd had enough of my saddlebag and post-pregnancy Sharpe-like stomach.

Gwyneth Paltrow?

Yes.

The one who can't get a dress tailored for an awards show small enough to actually fit in a frame ever.

I am not trying to shame her either.

I mean, like, whatever.

She looks like however she looks, and we all look however we look.

Um, thank you for doing this work, actually.

It's really important.

Um, so thank you.

That parasocial interaction theory that Amanda is studying is what's driving the success of all wellness influencers, like Courtney Kardashian.

I know for my body, like I need four to five days a week, like of working out.

So, right the second, we're doing gluten-free, dairy-free, which is so hard, me and my kids.

And Yolanda Hadid of The Real Housewives.

You are what you eat.

It's just a fact.

I also think that as a mom, we lead by example.

So, I continue to do all my organic, healthy stuff.

And Tom Brady of football.

Okay, let's start with breakfast.

Let's start with breakfast.

I eat a smoothie most of the time, like a really calorie-dense, nutrient-dense smoothie.

Some electrolytes, some protein powder.

And almond milk, right?

I love almond milk, hemp milk, a little rice milk from time to time.

And the gajillions of other wellness influencers flooding your social media feeds these days.

Move your body for 30 minutes every single day.

These people.

When you move your body, you literally change the chemical makeup inside your mind.

You change your anxiety, but you have to choose to do that.

Who's ready for yoga?

Oh my gosh.

Lifting Sweet is brought to you by William Sonoma.

Everyone gets a book, and I'll be doing signings, and you can grab some rosehip oil from Nowsent.

Strawberry gem cards.

The stems of your kale.

Magic Spirit.

If you guys have a heartburn issue, this is a way better option than Tom's.

Straw, probiotics,

all of the honest beauty.

I just can't wait for my friends to get here.

So back to that jade egg.

You might have heard about it in the news this past year because goop was sued for violating FTC regulations around deceptive advertising.

Unless you have really, really good scientific evidence, you can't say a piece of rock can treat, prevent, or cure anything.

So Goop was sued because of this woman.

My name is Bonnie Patton and I'm the executive director of Truth in Advertising or Tina.org for short.

And can you tell me a little bit about your work, about what you guys do?

Yes, so we're a small nonprofit based out of Madison, Connecticut, and we work to outstop

and prevent deceptive advertising.

And we do that in a variety of ways by educating consumers about it and also by bringing legal actions to the attention of state and federal regulators to stop the deceptive marketing practices of companies.

And if you had a pie chart of like what sorts of businesses or industries you end up looking at due to the number of consumer complaints you get, what would that pie chart look like?

The largest segment of the pie chart would probably be the wellness industry and within that uh you might see multi-level marketing in there also

but yeah wellness is is a huge area for us can we talk about the goop case i think that's the one that most people have heard of for your vijayj right and then what it did for your vijay j was like all kinds of stuff i think right i mean we laugh about it but you know it it really was preying on people with

really

gut-wrenching issues and problems, you know, saying that it could fix uterine prolapse.

Oh my God.

Help with infertility, things that were just so much taking advantage of

women.

I mean, that's what I thought of the first time I heard that this thing was out there.

It's like, I got, I hope no one who's got a real terminal illness is doing this instead.

Right.

But the problem with Goop, although people like to talk about the Jade Egg, is we found 50 different products that Goop was marketing that were making illegal disease treatment claims.

Right.

So it wasn't just the egg, it was oils and crystals and clothing and beauty products.

The best is stickers.

What?

Yes, they had stickers that

they promoted as having certain health benefits.

So you guys brought the case to

a California court?

We didn't bring it to a California court.

Where we brought it was to a group of district attorneys from different counties within California.

And they took action against Goop and required them to pay $145,000 in civil penalties.

And more importantly, from our perspective,

was that they have to refrain from making any claims about the efficacy or effects of any of its products unless they have competent and reliable scientific evidence to substantiate those claims.

We're looking into a product that was sold on Goop, a company called Moonjuice.

Ah, yes.

Are you familiar?

I'm familiar because I read an article that takes a look at Alex Jones, InfoWars, Goop, and I think Moonjuice and the similarities between all their products.

Amazing.

What are those similarities?

No, basically, InfoWars and Goop and Moonjuice are all selling the same products.

It's just to different audiences.

So selling adaptogenic tocotrinols?

Well, of course.

I know this sounds crazy, but it's true.

Alex Jones, the most seemingly Roid-raging of the alt-right conspiracy theorists, he who claimed that Sandy Hook was a hoax, also sells nutritional supplements containing some of the same ingredients as moon juice and goop products, dried mushrooms and goji berry and turmeric, though to a different customer base.

His product was not called Beauty Dust, but Caveman True Paleo Formula.

That caveman stuff was taken off the market when it was found to contain high levels of lead.

Alex Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Amanda Chantal Bacon are far from alone.

Just look at any Kardashian's Instagram.

There is a lot of that going on with Instagram influencers, Instagram models, and Tummy T.

And what is the other thing they do with the binding?

Oh, yes, the waist trainer.

Waist training, right.

And Tummy T.

Do you guys, have you looked into those?

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

You know, flat tummy tea is

really out there on Instagram.

And one thing we found is that they're using very young social media influencers, young women under the age of 21, under the age of 18,

athletes, dancers, to promote, you know, basically liquid X Lax.

And not only are they having these young influencers do it, but in many instances, they're deceptive ads because they don't tell the audience that the reason I'm promoting this laxative tea is because I have a material connection to the company.

So it's liquid X-Lax.

Yes.

I wondered what it was.

I mean, I never tried it.

Same ingredients as X-Lax.

Yikes.

But they don't say that, of course.

No.

Oh, yeah.

So what's the most outrageous claim you've ever seen in this world of wellness?

Oh my goodness.

There are many products out there and especially supplements that are miracle pills.

And those are the ones that are the craziest.

That not only can it cure HIV and cancer and diabetes and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, but it will also get rid of your wrinkles.

There are just many

supplements out there in which people are pitching them as literally being able to change your body at the cellular level.

Right.

We're hearing lately that the shift for a lot of these companies is into beauty from the inside out.

And then they tack on some other claims about oxidative stress, which hints at being able to cure cancer, but that the primary claim is that you'll look better.

Which is very important to a lot of people out there.

Right, right.

The other thing that we see a lot of that's very disheartening is, you know, if there wasn't enough pain and suffering in this world is makeup diseases, right?

Like adrenal fatigue.

It doesn't exist, right?

But, you know, you now need to buy six different supplements to cure your adrenal fatigue, which doesn't, isn't even a thing.

What about detoxing?

Right.

I mean, we actually have organs in our bodies that do great jobs at detoxing.

And I think when you look at the studies out there and you listen to the healthcare professionals, most of these detox products do much more harm than good.

Yeah.

Canada, I think a couple of days ago, barred the sale of vaginal detox products.

What are those?

Oh, yes.

You can just go online and buy them if you'd like.

You can go to Goddess Detox and get your herbal vaginal detox ingredients.

I did go on goddessdetox.org, not dot com, which was the first thing about this site that got my hackles up.

And they sell a product called Goddess Vaginal Detox Pearls, which are suppositories that proclaim to be an herbal alternative to a chemical solution to a problem they don't define that will purge your vagina of dead skin cells, mucus, yeast, and old blood clots.

That sounds scary.

Not only is it scary, but it's really taking advantage of a susceptible population.

You know, one of the things they say is that it can detox you from an ex-lover, which is just

no.

Well, it's difficult to battle a faith-based system.

I feel like in the wellness world, when people have faith in something, making a reasonable argument against it just doesn't work so much because they're like, well, I'm not looking at it that way.

Right.

And we should never discount the placebo effect, right?

It works.

It worked well for some people, and that's absolutely fine.

But at the same time, there are studies out there that say that people that go the natural route for cancer treatments, you know, are much more likely to die.

So

I think there is a line.

I'm not sure exactly where one wants to draw it, but I think that when it comes to these illegal disease treatment claims, it needs to be stopped.

We made the comparison a bit between Gwyneth Paltrow's company, Amanda Chantel-Bacon's company, and Alex Jones.

Is there anything that you have found that a lot of these folks who make these claims have in common, personality trait-wise?

Like, I've never been inspired myself to start a vitamin company that claims to do all kinds of things it can't do.

What kind of person wants to do that?

Someone who wants to make a lot of money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, wellness sells for better or worse.

It's cheap to make as a general matter and consumers are willing to spend a lot of money.

Because we don't want to die.

They don't want to die or they want to look beautiful.

They don't want wrinkles.

They don't want Alzheimer's.

They don't want gray hair.

They want to be thin, you know.

Yeah, and we'll pay anything for that.

So, yes, it's messed up that these products exist or don't work or work by some harmful mechanism.

But the scariest part is that they're being shoved in our faces all day long on our phones and magazines during interviews with some of the most famous, most influential, and highly respected people on the planet.

And they're telling us that they're good for our health.

Next time on the dream.

I was attending a church here in Northeast Wisconsin, evangelical church, non-denominational church, whatever.

And for some reason, the pastors decided to start endorsing

a local wellness center.

And within six months, a lot of events that this church hosted, so like a women's retreat, definitely several Bible studies, but they would incorporate messages of how

maybe one reason you're unbalanced spiritually or maybe another reason why you feel unwell

about God or about life is because your hormones are out of balance and you need to go to this place to get it balanced or get a chiropractic adjustment.

This is preached from the pulpit and then as you walked out of the sanctuary, there were coupons.

Referral coupons.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me and Dan Gallucci.

Editing by Peter Clowney and Tracy Samuelson.

Producing by Lyra Smith and Stephanie Kiriuki.

The Dream is executive produced by me, Dan Gallucci, Peter Clowney, and Chris Bannon.

Our mixing engineers are Casey Holford and Brendan Burns.

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Thank you.

And if you have a wellness experience, good or bad, that you'd like to share on our show, please call 715-600-0326.

That's 715-600-0326, and leave us a voicemail.

You may be featured on the program later this season.

Hey dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

It's the only tier.

No commercials.

Plus, bonus content.

This helps keep us independent.

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We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us.

We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So, what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there.

And we're just going to talk about what we bought.

It'll be fun.

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It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles.

See you there.