Last week, officials with NASA called out Gwyneth Paltrow’s “modern lifestyle brand” Goop for promoting “healing” stickers that it claimed were made from material designed for NASA space suits. Now, the company behind the stickers has apologized, claiming the inaccurate affirmation was just a big ol’ misunderstanding.
BGR reports that Body Vibes, the company making the wearable body stickers, claims the entire debacle was the result of a communication error and lack of fact-checking on its part.
The stickers — which sell for between $60 and $120 a pack — claim to “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies.”
In a now altered post, Goop promoted the stickers, claiming they were “made with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut’s vitals during wear.”
However, when approached about the wearables, NASA said the claim wasn’t true as they “do not have any conductive carbon material lining the spacesuits.” Instead, the spacesuits are actually made of synthetic polymers, spandex, and other materials, a rep for the agency said.
Former chief scientist at NASA Mark Shelhamer was a bit more blunt in his reaction to Goop and Body Vibes’ claims telling Gizmodo, “Wow. What a load of BS that is.”
At the time, Goop said that “advice and recommendations included on the site are not formal endorsements and the opinions expressed by the experts and companies profiled do not necessarily represent the views” of the site.
Now Body Vibes is speaking out, apologizing for the issue and claiming that an engineer was simply misinformed on the material used in the product.
“We never intended to mislead anyone. We have learned that our engineer was misinformed by a distributor about the material in question, which was purchased for its unique specifications,” the company said in a statement. “We regret not doing our due diligence before including the distributor’s information in the story of our product.”
Despite this, the company says that the misinformation has no bearing on the stickers’ effectiveness.
“The origins of the material do not anyway impact the efficacy of our product. Body Vibes remains committed to offering a holistic lifestyle tool and we stand by the quality and effectiveness of our product,” the company tells BGR.
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist