It’s turning into the greatest environmental challenge of our age – how do we transport celebrities safely and responsibly to global eco-summits, so that they can do a better job of lecturing the rest of us about carbon emissions?

The world has been agog at Camp Google, the three-day mass gathering at the luxury Verdura resort in Sicily, of 300 or so celebrity environmental activists, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bradley Cooper, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, Chris Martin and more – too many to list, even a rumoured (but unseen) Barack Obama. Not forgetting Prince Harry, who reportedly gave a stirring speech about the environment – barefoot! A startling image springs to mind of a Google aide shrugging off the carbon footprint of Harry’s journey (private jet and helicopter), but saying: “Uh, prince-dude, you need to lose the offensive shoes.”

Presumably the £16.5m eco-knees-up was at least partly enabled by Google’s ongoing tax avoidance, but let’s not spoil a beautiful moment with facts and stuff. A total of 114 private jets ferried the celebrities to Italy, releasing hundreds of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. As they arrived in Sicily, they transferred to Camp Google in luxury vehicles and/or helicopters.

Katy Perry was one of 300 guests at Camp Google. Photograph: Andy Kropa/Invision/AP

There followed what must surely have been intellectually invigorating A-list debates about how “we” (they mean us, not them) must conserve the Earth’s resources. After that, the celebrity activists retired to relax in their gratis £730-a-night-plus rooms, perchance haunted by the spectres of global eco-catastrophe and Coldplay agreeing to perform. Perhaps, like me, you’re thinking: “If only self-awareness could be solar-powered”? I mean, did anyone at Google realise how all this starry eco-activism might look to the outside world? The tiny disconnect between what Google and its guests were saying and what they were doing? Apparently not.

However, and this is a serious question: how do people expect eco-celebs to get around? When they lend support, as Emma Thompson did for the recent Extinction Rebellion rally in London, they risk being roasted under the hot sun of public and media condemnation. Is this fair – presumably the publicity a celebrity generates justifies the carbon? Should the famous stick to local events and videolinks or just not bother? It’s not as if Harry could have micro-scooted to Sicily or descended in a hot-air balloon, like a woke, royal Phileas Fogg.

Not that this excuses the gargantuan excess and repellent insincerity of Camp Google. (Note to Silicon Valley: if you want to throw grotesquely smug A-list beanos, spare us the ghastly faux-worthiness.)

However, it’s worth asking if mocking the motivations-cum-emissions of eco-celebs is fast turning into a socially acceptable bloodsport. While A-list hypocrisy is always great fun, our own isn’t entirely without its amusements.

Damn right I’m steamed up about this ‘beauty spa’

Wot? No Gwyneth Paltrow? Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Goop

British women with hideous, unsightly vaginas, rejoice – help is at hand! New York company VSPOT plans to open a “vaginal spa” in London’s Knightsbridge this autumn. Treatments could include vaginal steaming (I’ve always presumed this must be akin to crouching knickerless over a steaming kettle, but even better); “V-tightening” with a laser (a fun day out for all the family); and a mysterious herb-infused vagina “facial”. They do realise this isn’t where a lady’s face is, right?

This is serious. Like labial surgery, popularised by pornography, it sends out the message that female genitals are unacceptable left alone and need to be prettified. That something very wrong is going on “down there” and should be fretted about and attended to. Never mind that medical people point out that the vagina is self-cleaning and doesn’t require such treatments. Also, that steaming might not only burn the vaginal walls, but alter the heathy balance of bacteria, leading to infections. Astonishing, isn’t it? Who’d have thought that going boil-in-the-bag with genitals would be a bad idea? Trust qualified gynaecologists to ruin a relaxing spa day.

Another major alarm bell is that Gwyneth Paltrow appears to have no involvement in this company. Wasn’t Paltrow one of the intrepid pioneers of steaming vaginas? Didn’t she also champion inserting jade eggs until, again, some spoilsport gynaecologists said something about toxic shock syndrome and bacterial vaginosis?

Sorry, but I can’t take anything in the arena of vagina maintenance seriously unless Gwynnie’s face is attached. She is our queen of down-below quackery and female genitalia spruce-ups. She should be alerted that someone is trying to steal her vaginal thunder. In the meantime, I’ll continue to feel thrilled that women are being encouraged to worry about the actual insides of their bodies. Next week: women, are you satisfied with the shape of your kidneys?

This iron age woman seems strangely familiar...

Iron age woman: talk about living the high life. Photograph: Amt für Städtebau/Stadt Zurich

Not to get all “judgey” on iron age women, but at least one was a lazy, sweet-munching fashion victim, say Swiss archaeologists. They discovered a hollowed-out, tree-trunk coffin in the Aussersihl district in Zurich bearing the body of a well-to-do Celtic woman, wearing fine clothes and jewellery, with indications that she had a sweet tooth and did little physical work.

Could this be an ancestor of mine? There are eerie similarities, if you take away the upper-class bling, replace sweet with savoury and add “evidence” of entire weekends sprawled on the sofa watching boxsets of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, with no movement visible to the naked eye.

How did they get all this information from a 2,200-year-old corpse? And surely she could not have imagined that, in a couple of millennia, the world would be raising a censorious eyebrow over her amber necklaces and sweet-toothed indolence.

Perhaps the trend will catch on and henceforth people will be buried judgmentally with their consumer detritus – mobile phones, KFC buckets and Amazon vouchers. “It’s what she would have wanted – I mean, seriously, she really did want that Accessorize bracelet.” Modern people are criticised for sedentary, over-indulgent lifestyles, but it would appear we are merely following tradition.

• This article was amended on 5 August 2019 to omit a reference to Bono being at the Google event. He wasn’t.

• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist