Gwyneth Paltrow

THE STAR OPENS UP ABOUT RUNNING GOOP, RAISING TEENS, FINDING LASTING LOVE AND WHAT BRINGS HER THE MOST JOY IN HER 50S 

- MIA MCNIECE

Just before falling asleep one night last summer, Gwyneth Paltrow had a dream come true. After a family dinner at her home in Amagansett, N.Y., she and her husband of five years, TV writer-producer Brad Falchuk, retreated to their room upstairs. "We go to bed ridiculously early," she says with a laugh. Her two children, Apple, 19, and Moses, 17 (with Coldplay singer Chris Martin, her ex-husband), and Falchuk's two kids, Isabella, 19, and Brody, 17, from a previous marriage, remained downstairs. "I heard these guffaws of laughter from all the kids, and I almost burst into tears," says Paltrow, who admits that blending a family, especially one with four teenagers, is no easy task. "It's hard, and it's not intuitive, and nobody tells you how to do it. You just stick with it. Now it's one of the things that brings me the most happiness in my life."

Another source of joy for Paltrow is Goop, and she chats excitedly about her lifestyle brand from the company's headquarters in Santa Monica just a few days shy of her 51st birthday in late September. Paltrow assumed life in her 50s would slow down. She was wrong. "I had the erroneous idea that I would be able to downshift a little bit," she says. "But life is very full-on."

Her busy schedule is in part due to Goop's latest endeavor: good.clean.goop, a new line of skin care, body care and wellness products available at Target and Amazon. "We felt passionate about creating clean, efficacious products at a more accessible price for a broader audience," she says. "They call it masstige in the industry. I love that word, between 'mass' and 'prestige.' And so we set out to create this, and it's been so much fun."