Gwyneth Paltrow Honors Her 50th With a Set of Photos in Her Birthday Suit

Gwyneth Paltrow is shouting the fact that she’s officially been on Earth for half a century loud and clear. After sharing an essay in which she declared that she’s ready to accept her wrinkles, the Oscar winner and Goop founder marked the milestone of her 50th birthday by sharing a photoshoot in which the only things she’s wearing are gold body paint and the wedding ring gifted to her by her husband Brad Falchuk. “All I know is that they’re painting me gold and that I have to be naked,” Paltrow told her own site. “I feel so good turning 50, and this is about expressing that sense of energy and optimism that I’m experiencing. It’s more about the female gaze and just a sense of fun.”

In addition to the essay and what Goop is touting as a “Goldfinger-meets-2022 shoot,” Paltrow reflected on her 50th in an episode of her podcast with Falchuk that begins with recalling how she had a “flip out about physical aging” when she turned 40, leading her to get “the worst” Botox. “When you grow up kind of considered an attractive woman in the culture and you make your whole career off of that in a sense…,” she said. “You get parts because people think that you’re attractive, or my kind of parts anyway. I think it was just a bit of an identity crisis—figuring out, like, what if I wasn’t sexually desirable? What did that make me?” Over the past decade, she’s been able to recalibrate—“to accept that my body’s not the same or my metabolism’s not the same or I have wrinkles. It’s kind of a beautiful adjustment if you start to make it more consciously.”

For Paltrow, marking turning another year older by sharing a birthday suit photo has become something of a tradition. She also Instagrammed nudes to mark her 48th and 49th—though her 50th one definitely takes the (birthday) cake.