Australian punk outfit Private Function have released a special edition of their latest record, which they say “smells like Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina.”
The band announced the pressing on Instagram, where member Lauren Hester is seen in a lab holding the manufactured, pink vinyl. “I want you to cast your mind back to the fabulous year of 2020,” Hester commands.
“There was one news story that completely dominated the headlines: Gwyneth Paltrow released a candle that smelt like her vagina. This was potentially the greatest thing anyone had ever done,” she says coyly.
Hester explains that these candles now sell for over $700 each. The band “decided to take things into their own hands” and created the first scratch-and-sniff vinyl. Claiming that the tall order of almost a thousand dollars to smell the candle is “classist,” Hester continued: “We at Private Function think that every working-class person deserves to have access to the smell 24 hours a day.”
The record is called their ‘Goopy’ variant, as Paltrow originally teamed up with the brand ‘Goop’ for the creation. This isn’t the first controversial vinyl released by the band. In 2022, they released 370HSSV 0773H, which was issued as a liquid disc with the band’s urine inside. Previous to that, in 2020 they released Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which was pressed as a limited edition wich featured bags of white powder inside the record.
Amazingly, the band have almost predicted Paltrow’s exact stance on her candle in the video. On May 18th, the actress again defended her product, explaining that it started off as a joke. Speaking at the Manifesting Summot, she stated: “We were messing around with different scents one day and I smelled something and I was like ‘Oh, that smells like…you know…’”
The actor talked of how it was quickly uploaded to the site: “But I kept it on the site because there is an aspect to women’s sexuality that I think we’re socialised to feel a lot of shame, and I sort of loved this punk rock idea. We are beautiful and we are awesome and go fuck yourself.” Private Function have certainly capitalised on the “punk” sensibility of the cultural phenomenon.
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