Blake Lively's Short-Lived Website, Preserve, Caught a Lot of Criticism

There was a period of time when it seemed like a lot of celebs wanted to capitalize on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop success. The controversial lifestyle brand started out as a newsletter in 2008 before expanding into (overpriced) e-commerce in 2012, which then spawned wellness summits, a magazine, a podcast, and even a Netflix docuseries.

Given its enormous success, it makes sense that other celebs wanted a piece of the lifestyle-website pie. If you'll recall, Kourtney Kardashian put out Poosh. Pretty Little Liars star Shay Mitchell even said her lifestyle blog Amore & Vita was inspired by Gwyneth's brand.

But you may have forgotten that, for a hot second, It Ends With Us star Blake Lively had her own lifestyle site called Preserve.

Blake launched Preserve in 2014. Like Goop, it was a lifestyle site mixed with e-commerce. But a lot of folks felt that the website's writing left a lot to be desired.

At the time, the self-proclaimed "jackals" over at Oh No They Didn't had a ball roasting some select paragraphs from the site, including a tidbit about fall picnics that encouraged readers to "enjoy everything Mother Nature has to offer before she descends into her own euphoric slumber in advance of spring's rebirth."

There was also this blurb about wheat, which said, in part, "Wheat is meant to signify love, charity, faith, prosperity, abundance, bounty, fertility, and closeness to mother earth. Some of its most famous emblem blazers are Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, the bible ...."

One ONTD commenter responded to this particular section with: "I don't even know what to say about this, such words, much beautiful, wow."

"Ugh, it's so obvious she and her people are hovered over the computer with a thesaurus in hand," someone else commented about the site in general. "And holy crap, everything is overpriced. That $1,350 cloak better grant me the power of invisibility or some s--t."

But in addition to folks' gripes with the writing — and their issues with the prices (apparently they had $40 artisanal salt!) — was the fact that Blake, who'd gotten married in 2012 on a plantation, also had a blog post about the "Allure of Antebellum."

In this blog post, Blake's team apparently put together a fashion collection that showcased the "authenticity" of the "Southern Belle," whose "inherent social distinction set the standards for style and appearance" and "epitomized Southern hospitality with a cultivation of beauty and grace, but even more with a captivating and magnetic sensibility," as reposted by southinpopculture.com. The Preserve post encouraged readers to "embrace the season and the magic below the Mason-Dixon with styles as theatric as a Dixie drawl."

Considering the Antebellum South's dark history involving slavery, this kind of writing wasn't exactly a hit with people, who were also put off by the fact that Blake and her husband Ryan Reynolds held their wedding on another piece of dark history: a plantation.

In the end, Blake ended up shutting her site down in 2015, claiming that they'd launched it before they were really ready, and that she wanted to relaunch it properly in the future. Looks like we haven't gotten Preserve 2.0 yet, but maybe it's for the best. Not all of our projects can be winners!